What are characters for?

[Brett Evill]

G'day

After making my latest contribution to the 'who owns a PC's emotions'
thread, I had a thought which I thought worth sharing.

The importance of characters to dramatist games is obvious. And in a
simulationist game, the character is what the character-player simulates,
so that's clear enough. But I have often been puzzled that gamist players
bother with the eleborate superstructure of characters, background, and
continuity. I have often wondered why gamist GMs do not simply preent a
series of 'pop quizzes'. Now I have the glimmering of a thought. Is it
that characters, continuity, etc simply provide an interesting set of
contraints in a format that is readily described and easily remembered?

--
Brett Evill

To reply, remove 'spamblocker.' from <b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au>

[Psychohist]

Brett Evill posts, in part:

The importance of characters to dramatist games is obvious.
And in a simulationist game, the character is what the
character-player simulates, so that's clear enough. But I
have often been puzzled that gamist players bother with the
eleborate superstructure of characters, background, and

continuity.... Is it that characters, continuity, etc

simply provide an interesting set of contraints in a format
that is readily described and easily remembered?

I have one strongly game oriented player, and I think this is pretty much the
way he thinks of the game, albeit oversimplified. That he is game oriented is
reflected in statements to the effect that he is primarily interested in the
game for the player challenge. He has hinted that he views the game goals as
obtaining a character who is 'the best' at something.

(I think some of his characters seduce him into a moderately deep character
stance in which these goals are forgotten, but they are only forgotten for so
long as he remains in character.)

Speaking of which, there are a couple of player stances which don't seem to me
to fit well into the 'four stances' model.

One is the player who, as discussed above, is working towards a player goal,
say having a more powerful character than any of the other players (perhaps
including the gamesmaster). Sarah Kahn had suggested that this might be a
separate stance (player? gamer?), but I'm concerned that might be an
oversimplification.

Another is the player who is trying to discover the gamesmaster's intended plot
in order to forward it. This type of play has been mentioned primarily as an
annoyance by world oriented gamesmasters who don't have intended plots, but the
players must have found the behavior pattern useful in prior games. I would
assume that it would be result in a better story if, in fact, the gamesmaster
does indeed have a story outline in mind.

I suppose this might be related to audience stance - something like a reader
trying to figure out how the story will end while half way through the book.
It might also be related to the actor stance - trying to find out what the
lines and acting directions are, so to speak, so that they can be acted.

The way the narrative stances have been defined, though, I think 'audience' has
generally been interpreted as a passive activity, and 'actor' as relating
specifically to portrayal. This doesn't really leave room for the 'discovery'
aspect of 'what is the gamesmaster up to'.

Comments?

Warren Dew

[Edward McWalters]

psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>Speaking of which, there are a couple of player stances which don't seem to me
>to fit well into the 'four stances' model.
>
>One is the player who, as discussed above, is working towards a player goal,
>say having a more powerful character than any of the other players (perhaps
>including the gamesmaster). Sarah Kahn had suggested that this might be a
>separate stance (player? gamer?), but I'm concerned that might be an
>oversimplification.
>
>Another is the player who is trying to discover the gamesmaster's intended plot
>in order to forward it. This type of play has been mentioned primarily as an
>annoyance by world oriented gamesmasters who don't have intended plots, but the
>players must have found the behavior pattern useful in prior games. I would
>assume that it would be result in a better story if, in fact, the gamesmaster
>does indeed have a story outline in mind.

I think the problem here is RGFA's traditional one of misusing the
four stances: As originally conceived, they were merely meant to
describe the constantly rotating methods by which each player
interacts with the game. As such, they can perhaps best be
characterized by four questions: "What is happening?" (Audience)
"What would I like to be happening?" (Author) "What is my character
thinking?" (IC) "How do I communicate my character's words and
actions to the rest of the group?" (Actor)

In your examples above, I think what we are actually seeing are
examples of the interaction of the simulationist/dramatist/gamist
aesthetics with the four stances. As these three camps each represent
a significantly different approach to roleplay, they will, of
necessity, engender significantly different approaches to the
questions each stance represents. Here's a rundown of how each camp
might approach each stance/question.

Audience Stance

Gamist: What problems does this situation present for me to solve?
What mechanics are being used here, and how do they function?

Simulationist: What events are taking place right now? What do they
mean? Do these events have internal consistency?

Dramatist: What events are taking place right now? What impact will
they have on the story? What *is* the story?

Author stance

Gamist: What can I do to change the situation and further my set
goals?

Simulationist: What would my character do in this situation?

Dramatist: What should my character do in this situation? What
actions would produce the most rewarding and interesting results?

Actor stance

Gamist: How can I give the best and most effective performance?

Simulationist: How can I most accurately communicate my character's
behaviour to the rest of the group?

Dramatist: How can I most affectingly communicate my character's
thoughts, actions, and feelings?

In-Character

Gamist: How will my character's personality traits restrict or
enhance my actions?

Simulationist: What is my character thinking and feeling?

Dramatist: What is my character thinking and feeling?

Please keep in mind that these examples represent the extremes of each
position; dramatist or simulationist or gamist to the exclusion of all
else. Every player's preferences represent a mixture of these
positions, so I am not suggesting that gamers who identify themselves
as 'dramatists' (like myself) are completely unconcerned with reality,
or that anyone subscribing to either of the other camps is in any way
lacking as a roleplayer.

All that being said, I would describe your first example as a
predominantly gamist player working from the author stance. Your
second example I would describe as a fairly extreme dramatist player
working from both the audience and author stances.

Edward J. McWalters edwa...@ix.netcom.com

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Psychohist wrote:

> Speaking of which, there are a couple of player stances which don't
> seem to me to fit well into the 'four stances' model.
>
> One is the player who, as discussed above, is working towards a player
> goal, say having a more powerful character than any of the other
> players (perhaps including the gamesmaster). Sarah Kahn had suggested
> that this might be a separate stance (player? gamer?), but I'm
> concerned that might be an oversimplification.
>

Hmm. I developed the original four-stance model as a means of
understanding rpg approaches to *narrative*. The orientation (gamist)
that you describe here may not be a narrative orientation--I'm unsure.
What do you think?

> Another is the player who is trying to discover the gamesmaster's
> intended plot in order to forward it. This type of play has been
> mentioned primarily as an annoyance by world oriented gamesmasters who
> don't have intended plots, but the
> players must have found the behavior pattern useful in prior games. I
> would assume that it would be result in a better story if, in fact,
> the gamesmaster does indeed have a story outline in mind.
>

> I suppose this might be related to audience stance - something like a
> reader trying to figure out how the story will end while half way
> through the book. It might also be related to the actor stance -
> trying to find out what the lines and acting directions are, so to
> speak, so that they can be acted.
>
> The way the narrative stances have been defined, though, I think
> 'audience' has generally been interpreted as a passive activity, and
> 'actor' as relating specifically to portrayal. This doesn't really
> leave room for the 'discovery' aspect of 'what is the gamesmaster up
> to'.
>
> Comments?

I never intended the audience stance to be primarily passive, although
that is the way it has developed. What you describe above would fit
very well my own original understanding of an audience stance player.

These things take on a life of their own :)

It does not have to be purely a GM plot, by the way. Mark Wallace has
introduced me to character-driven plots, which the GM is expected to
work with and enhance, but which for which the player is the primary
author and audience.

For example, in one of Mark's games I developed a tragic character, who
we both agreed would come to a bitter and ignomious, anti-heroic end.
The play in the game consisted of the two of us passing the
authorial/audience ball back and forth, as we shaped the story of the
character.

Best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Edward McWalters wrote:

> I think the problem here is RGFA's traditional one of misusing the
> four stances: As originally conceived, they were merely meant to
> describe the constantly rotating methods by which each player
> interacts with the game. As such, they can perhaps best be
> characterized by four questions: "What is happening?" (Audience)
> "What would I like to be happening?" (Author) "What is my character
> thinking?" (IC) "How do I communicate my character's words and
> actions to the rest of the group?" (Actor)

I'm not sure there *is* a single correct definition of the four
stances--different people have found value in them in different places.
What you describe above certainly makes sense, but it is not exactly
what I had in mind when I introduced the terms to our collective
conceptual vocabulary. It may or may not be congruent with my original
intent--tell me what you think :)

My original post started with a review of definitions of rpg taken from
about 25 different rpgs--ranging from HERO to MERPS to ARIA to THEATRIX
to GURPS to OTE and including many others. All of those game systems
have sections if their rules, at one point or another, that attempt to
define role-play. And I observed (and received some criticism for it,
too) that all of them defined rpg as a narrative activity.

I then looked at the various metaphors, implicit or explicit in these
discussions. I suggested (and I received some criticism for it, too)
that they all were of the basic structure "rpg is like x" where "x" is
one or another of various modes of story-telling: theatre, cinema,
novel, myth, and so on.

Up to this point, by the way, I was proceeding as Brian Gleichman
suggests an "affirmative" post should. But I soon departed from his
model . . .

I then asked "given this metaphor, what can we say about how we approach
the game?" I suggested that we look closely at *one* of these
metaphors--rpg is like theatre (I took some criticism for that, too).
"If rpg is like cinema, I asked, then what does that really mean for how
we engage in the play?" I suggested (and received some criticism for
doing so) that we could unpack that particular metaphor in one of three
ways: we engage in doing rpg like a play-wright authors a play; we can
engage in doing rpg like an actor acts a play; we can engage in doing
rpg like an audience interprets a stage-play.

I then went on to discuss all the ways in which this metaphor was
deceptive--all the ways in which it failed to encompass what rpg is
like. The limitations of the metaphor, if you like. (I got criticized
here, too :)

After a great deal of discussion, Sarah wrote me privately--and we
discussed some more. And ultimately we agreed that the actor stance
deserved further elaboration--so we split it in two, IC and Actor.

At any rate, the short-hand descriptions you provide above are OK so far
as they go--they just leave a good bit out.

For example, Audiences are hardly passive--a person who is a reflective
audience is always interpreting what is going on. So the audience
stance, as I originally conceived it, has a self-conscious interpretive
element to it. Audience entails recasting and retelling--which is much
more than simply asking "what is happening."

Similarly, while Actors are concerned with the question of portrayal,
that included more than words or thoughts. The Actor stance can
include, for example, emotion. At an altogether different level, it can
also include expressing an appreciation for allegory, or irony. Indeed,
the breadth of the Actor stance was one of the reasons that Sarah and I
thought it useful to split it. In the new formulation, the IC stance
incorporated the stance of the character actor--which rules out
meta-character concerns like allegory.

Moreover, Sarah, in a series of really intelligent posts (and critical,
in the very best sense of the term), forced me to take notice of the
degree to which each of these stances is present in all rpgs, and
likewise the degree to which they are mutually incompatible. All rpgs,
then, contain strategic choices which balance these stances in various
ways, and with various costs.

I do hope this helps.

My best,
Kevin

[Psychohist]

In response to my query, Edward J. McWalters posts, in part:

I think the problem here is RGFA's traditional one of
misusing the four stances: As originally conceived, they
were merely meant to describe the constantly rotating
methods by which each player interacts with the game.

Yes. I plead guilty.

I like eleven of the twelve stance X triangle examples you give. However, I
have a bit of a problem regarding the character stance gamist example:

How will my character's personality traits restrict or
enhance my actions?

I don't really see how this involves taking the character's point of view.
Given that for this stance only, you used the same example for the
simulationist and dramatist approaches, perhaps you could use that one ("What
is my character thinking and feeling") for the gamist, too.

Your second example I would describe as a fairly extreme
dramatist player working from both the audience and author
stances.

It could also be a gamist working from these stances: some players have
experiences indicating that their characters are more likely to be successful
if they go with the gamesmaster's intended story line.

Warren Dew

[Psychohist]

Kevin Hardwick provides some detail on the development of the narrative stances
model of which I was previously unaware. (Thanks!)

Of interest to me is the fact that the original model did not include a
separate 'character' stance - particularly since, to me, the stance has never
really fit into the original theatre metaphor. In a traditional stage play,
the author writes the lines and the actor presents them to the audience; the
character doesn't really even exist on the same level as the author, actor, and
audience do.

I wonder if the need for a separate character stance reflects a difference -
perhaps even the distinguishing characteristic - between roleplaying games and
traditional narrative.

This may also explain why the character stance seems to vary less over the
different campaign styles than do the other stances.

Warren Dew

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0305...@tynslip1.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>G'day
>
>After making my latest contribution to the 'who owns a PC's emotions'
>thread, I had a thought which I thought worth sharing.
>

>The importance of characters to dramatist games is obvious. And in a
>simulationist game, the character is what the character-player simulates,
>so that's clear enough. But I have often been puzzled that gamist players
>bother with the eleborate superstructure of characters, background, and

>continuity. I have often wondered why gamist GMs do not simply preent a

>series of 'pop quizzes'. Now I have the glimmering of a thought. Is it

>that characters, continuity, etc simply provide an interesting set of
>contraints in a format that is readily described and easily remembered?

What do you mean by "gamist"?

I think I could take simulationist and dramatist positions to similar
extremes: "A pure simulationist game doesn't need to bother with individual
characters, but only with populations, and a pure dramatist game doesn't need
to bother with individual characters, but only with dramatic archtypes."

My understanding of the triangle is that "dramatist" puts priority on game
events being *dramatic*, that "simulationist" puts priority on game-events
being *realistic* (in the sense of having logical consistency and
verisimilitude), and "gamist" puts priority on game-events being *fair* (in
the sense of characters having a "fair chance" at success & survival).

So a dramatist game needs characters to be dramatic about, a simulationist
game needs characters as real people in a real world, and a gamist game needs
characters to be fair to.

Erol K. Bayburt
Evil Genius for a Better Tomorrow

[Edward McWalters]

psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>I like eleven of the twelve stance X triangle examples you give. However, I
>have a bit of a problem regarding the character stance gamist example:
>
> How will my character's personality traits restrict or
> enhance my actions?
>
>I don't really see how this involves taking the character's point of view.
>Given that for this stance only, you used the same example for the
>simulationist and dramatist approaches, perhaps you could use that one ("What
>is my character thinking and feeling") for the gamist, too.

You may have a point. Characterizing the gamist style was a bit
problematic; the motivations behind such play are very alien to my way
of thinking, so I felt a bit unsure in characterizing it at all.

I think you're probably correct under some circumstances, but that
whether or not a gamist player considers the character's thoughts at
all will depend a great deal upon his defined objectives in playing --
if, for instance, his objectives are limitted to things like winning
fights, he may not take his character's mental state into account at
all.

Edward J. McWalters edwa...@ix.netcom.com

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Brett asks a quite pragmatic question, under a provocative and
intriguing title.

At the risk of diverting attention from his original problem, I'd like
to ask a somewhat different question that addresses the question from
another angle.

Brett--let me know if you want to move this discussion over to another
thread--I do not want to distract from your formulation at all.

*****

What *is* a character, anyway?

At one level this is so basic, so fundamental, that we tend not to think
about it at all. I know this was the case for me, anyway, until the
recent discussion about when, if ever, it is appropriate for a GM to
coerce a PC's inner state.

We can give several answers to this question, it seems to me. For
example, perhaps a character is a fictional "self." Perhaps a
character is an identity that we make up in order to play in an rpg.

This still doesn't really answer the question, since all we've done is
substitute labels--character is self, character is identity. What then
is self? What is identity?

Perhaps a character can be defined somewhat differently--it is that part
of the world which the player owns? Maybe--my guess is that this is
part of it, but that this is still too broad--it is possible for the
player to own part of the world and not have that part be character.

The metaphor "rpg is like theatre" may help a little here. A character
is an identity an actor can assume. In drama, a character is something
an audience can identify with, which can play a role in a dramatic
conflict--it does not have to be a person, however.

There is an interesting question here for the immersive player. The
immersive actor still has an external force--script and director--giving
her broad guidelines within which to immerse herself. "At this point in
the play, my character is sad." In an rpg, however, such external
intrusions can sometimes be unwelcome--so in fact, the rpg immersive
actor--the IC player--is more radically adrift than is a stage-actor.
Pushed too far, this isolation strikes me as potentially disruptive to
the immersion. There is a necessary boundary there against which the IC
player *must* push--but that bounday is a whole lot looser than the one
which confronts a stage-actor.

In general, I suspect we tend all of us to give similar answers to the
question "what is a character." I think it would be interesting to try
to pin this down somewhat--it might suggest to us other alternatives to
doing role-play. Even if we never decide to enact those other
alternatives, knowing they exist will sharpen our own understanding of
what we actually do.

An aside, in reply to a remark by John Kim: John posts elsewhere that
he does not find philosophical questions all that useful when talking
about specific rpg issues. I'm led to the question I'm posing here,
however, precisely because I see parallels in our discussion here to
issues that have been discussed by philosophers. So making connections
between two very different fields of endeavor is useful to me, since it
helps me ask fresh questions about rpgs. So I think it does have a
place on this board.

So--what are characters for? When we talk about character in the
context of rpg, just what *are* we talking about?

My best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

In continuing to think about this, I have a question for Mary Kuhner:

As an immersive player, how do you decide when your character feels
strong emotions?

Leaving aside the question of coercion, which as Brett mentioned may be
a blind ally anyway, is it ever helpful to you to have the GM suggest an
emotional state for your character?

I know that in real-life, there are times when I can choose either to
control or to vent my emotions, and other times when I cannot--when the
emotions sweep over me, and carry me along, willy-nilly.

If it is important in a game to replicate that experience--of being
swept up in emotion (and I must confess that I've never really thought
about this before)--how do you do that and still stay IC? Isn't it part
of the actual experience to have the emotion impinge on you externally,
so to speak? So doesn't it requite either an external suggestion to
make that happen, or else for you to drop the IC stance and make an
authorial decision?

Thanks for your thoughts on this--this strikes me as an intriguing
question, although perhaps (as I sometimes do) I've framed this in such
a way that I'm just missing something obvious.

As an aside--that is the danger for the person who negotiates life in
abstractions--you can get so caught up in them that you miss the
obvious--as opposed to the concrete and pragmatic approach exemplified
so powerfully here by your thinking, and likewise John's.

Different personalities, different strengths to bring to the table :)

My best,
Kevin

[Edward McWalters]

"Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:
>I'm not sure there *is* a single correct definition of the four
>stances--different people have found value in them in different places.
>What you describe above certainly makes sense, but it is not exactly
>what I had in mind when I introduced the terms to our collective
>conceptual vocabulary. It may or may not be congruent with my original
>intent--tell me what you think :)

......snip....

>For example, Audiences are hardly passive--a person who is a reflective
>audience is always interpreting what is going on. So the audience
>stance, as I originally conceived it, has a self-conscious interpretive
>element to it. Audience entails recasting and retelling--which is much
>more than simply asking "what is happening."
>
>Similarly, while Actors are concerned with the question of portrayal,
>that included more than words or thoughts. The Actor stance can
>include, for example, emotion. At an altogether different level, it can
>also include expressing an appreciation for allegory, or irony. Indeed,
>the breadth of the Actor stance was one of the reasons that Sarah and I
>thought it useful to split it. In the new formulation, the IC stance
>incorporated the stance of the character actor--which rules out
>meta-character concerns like allegory.

I think that, for the most part, the profile I've suggested is
congruent with your original intent. When you originally outlined the
stances on RGFA, the gamist/simulationist/dramatist distinctions had
not yet been drawn, and I think that knowledge of those distinctions
requires that we change the way we look at the stances.

Looking at the stances in light of the gamist/simulationist/dramatist
distinctions, there is, understandably (given your gaming preferences,
as well as Sarah's), a strong dramatist's bias in the original
description: Audience stance entails examining the events of the game
not as a participant but as a spectator; actor stance is concerned
with issues like allegory and irony. These are issues of major
concern to dramatist players, but ones of which simulationist players
want no part. Similarly, a gamist player may or may not have any
interest in such issues depending on his set objectives in play.

Therefore, in order for the stance model to be as broadly applicable
as possible, such dramatist-specific concerns should not be included
in the most basic definitions of each stance. This is why the basic
descriptions I presented in my earlier post are as simple as they are;
enthusiasts of each approach will add different focuses and slants to
the basic questions that each stance represents, and no two approaches
will ask the questions in the same way. This in turn, is why, if you
look at the gamist/simulationist/dramatist specific examples I
offered, you'll find most of the elements that you pointed out as
absent from the basic questions.

Your thoughts, Kevin?

Edward J. McWalters edwa...@ix.netcom.com

[Psychohist]

Kevin Hardwick asks of Mary Kuhner:

As an immersive player, how do you decide when your
character feels strong emotions?

I'm not Mary, but I'm sure you'll get an answer from her, too.

When playing immersively, I don't have to - indeed, I can't - decide such
things. I, as the character, just feel the emotions.

I know that in real-life, there are times when I can
choose either to control or to vent my emotions, and
other times when I cannot--when the emotions sweep over
me, and carry me along, willy-nilly.

If it is important in a game to replicate that
experience--of being swept up in emotion (and I must
confess that I've never really thought about this
before)--how do you do that and still stay IC?

How could you actually be swept up in the emotions if you weren't in character?
After all, we're talking about the character's emotions here - if you aren't
the character, any emotions you experience aren't the character's, either.

Isn't it part of the actual experience to have the
emotion impinge on you externally, so to speak? So
doesn't it requite either an external suggestion to
make that happen, or else for you to drop the IC
stance and make an authorial decision?

In the player world, Warren Dew does not require an external suggestion to
experience emotion. When playing immersively, I as the character don't,
either.

Of course, Warren doesn't particularly feel that uncontrollable emotions are
alien things that impinge on him from the outside. Rather, they seem to him to
be things which well up from the inside. This is how it works for my
immersively played characters in worlds other than the player world, as well.

Kevin, do you generally feel that emotions come from outside yourself, rather
than welling from inside? If different players experience these things so
differently, that could explain a lot about differences on how to play
characters.

Warren Dew

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Psychohist wrote:

> Kevin, do you generally feel that emotions come from outside yourself,
> rather than welling from inside? If different players experience
> these things so differently, that could explain a lot about
> differences on how to play characters.
>
> Warren Dew

Well, it depends on what you mean by "yourself." There are times when
feelings, for me, spring up from a part of me that is beyond my concious
control.

Sometimes I don't even know where they come from--they just appear.
Often times I can talk them through with my wife, and she will say
things like "you're probably processing something from your class this
morning" or whatever, and I'll think "she's right." So sometimes I'm
not even aware of where the feelings are coming from, until someone
close to me brings it to my conscious attention.

I don't play immersively, for the most part. I find the deep immersive
stance hard to get into--although it is what I'm trying to do, most
times I play rpgs. When I do get "in character" immersively, its a
really neat experience--its worth the effort.

Usually when I am immersive its because I'm in a constrained
situation--that is, I've usually had a lot of help from the GM and other
players to help me get there. I will readily agree, by the way, that I
don't much like the GM *requiring* my character to feel something--most
times, although not all times--that gets in the way of my ability to be
immersive in the first place.

Anyway, I've never been able to be immersive in an unconstrained
situation.

This is hard--bear with me. The key term here is "constrained."
Usually what happens for me is that I develop a character for a long
time in the actor and author stances. And I do so in a semi-public
way--through lots of conversation with the GM, and in less detail with
the other players. To a certain extent I need the GM to know what makes
my character tick, so that he can help me get immersive in particular
situations, as they develop. So a constrained situation is one which
develops with the GM knowing that it pertains in some way to a facet of
my character's personality. I guess what I mean by "constrained" is
somewhat analagous to "direction" in a stage-play. Its easier for me to
be in character, immersively, when I get some direction from the GM.

An unconstrained situation is one in which there is nothing going on
that bears particularly on my character's personality--no direction,
nothing analagous to a script (hmm--that's loaded and possibly
misleading--does that make sense to you?) to help me be in-character.

Yesterday I got really mad. I was driving on the beltway, and some
yahoo cut me off, and I got really mad. Normally that doesn't
happen--normally other drivers don't cause me to lose my cool. Now what
was interesting there is that I had no idea why I was so mad--and it was
only after I got home and cooled down that I realized what was going
on--my frustrations were really not with the other driver (even though
he was a yahoo :), but related to something that had happened the
previous day.

Now I've never had that happen to me in an rpg. I've never gotten
really po'd, in character, and realized in-character that it pertained
to something that was frustrating to the character somewhere else. But
I can imagine, with a little bit of GM constraint working in the game,
that I could.

Help me out here Warren--I'm having trouble finding words to express
myself. Does any of this make sense?

Best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Edward McWalters wrote:

> I think that, for the most part, the profile I've suggested is
> congruent with your original intent. When you originally outlined the
>
> stances on RGFA, the gamist/simulationist/dramatist distinctions had
> not yet been drawn, and I think that knowledge of those distinctions
> requires that we change the way we look at the stances.

Well, the stances emerged out of the analysis of metaphors which
described rpg.

So one way to approach this would be to ask what metaphors do we use to
describe other styles of play.

I don't think that the analyis by which I developed the stances is
biased towards "drama" per se. (Actually, in a philosophic sense I
do--but in this instance I agree with John Kim--I don't think that the
philosophic argument will help us all that much in this conversation.)
The metaphor it stems from pertains to narrative--not all stage-plays
are dramatic, although of course many, even most, are.

> Looking at the stances in light of the gamist/simulationist/dramatist
> distinctions, there is, understandably (given your gaming preferences,
>
> as well as Sarah's), a strong dramatist's bias in the original
> description

Well, it is the case that I was concerned in the conversation some years
ago to understand dramatist gaming. So I can see how you might have the
impression that that is my preferred style of game--it is, after all,
what I talked about the most on rgfa. But I'm actually quite eclectic
in my preferences--I like most styles of rpg, if they are done well.

> : Audience stance entails examining the events of the game
> not as a participant but as a spectator; actor stance is concerned
> with issues like allegory and irony. These are issues of major
> concern to dramatist players, but ones of which simulationist players
> want no part. Similarly, a gamist player may or may not have any
> interest in such issues depending on his set objectives in play.

Sarah wrote a series of brilliant essays in which she made the case that
the stances operated both in balance and in tension against each other,
and that to some degree all of them were present in all games.

John Kim, IIRC, included the gist of these essays in his section of the
FAQ dealing with the stances. I've asked John elsewhere on the board to
repost the FAQ, which may help some.

If he can't do that, I may still have copies of Sarah's posts--I'll try
to dig them up.

My best,
Kevin

[Paul Mason]

On 03 May 1998 07:15:18 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>Kevin Hardwick provides some detail on the development of the narrative stances
>model of which I was previously unaware. (Thanks!)
>
>Of interest to me is the fact that the original model did not include a
>separate 'character' stance - particularly since, to me, the stance has never
>really fit into the original theatre metaphor. In a traditional stage play,
>the author writes the lines and the actor presents them to the audience; the
>character doesn't really even exist on the same level as the author, actor, and
>audience do.

Unless it's a Pirandello...

---

Best wishes
Paul Mason
Outlaws/imazine http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~panurge

[Psychohist]

Edward J. McWalters posts, in part:

Audience stance entails examining the events of the game

not as a participant but as a spectator; actor stance is
concerned with issues like allegory and irony. These are
issues of major concern to dramatist players, but ones of
which simulationist players want no part.

I'm not sure I'd go that far, at least with regard to the audience stance. The
three styles were originally used for describing campaigns, or perhaps
gamesmasters, and only later applied to players; as a world oriented
('simulationist') gamesmaster, I'm very interested in how the simulation works
out, and I feel that interest is clearly an audience stance activity.

Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:

I don't think that the analyis by which I developed the
stances is biased towards "drama" per se. (Actually, in
a philosophic sense I do--but in this instance I agree
with John Kim--I don't think that the philosophic argument
will help us all that much in this conversation.) The
metaphor it stems from pertains to narrative--not all
stage-plays are dramatic, although of course many, even
most, are.

I seem to recall Sarah Kahn mentioning that she played in some games that were
not particularly dramatic, but pretty clearly fell in the style that's now
called 'dramatist' - one of the reasons why I prefer the term 'story oriented'.

I think that in a very fundamental way, world oriented simulations cannot be
viewed as narratives - or to put it another way, viewing them as narratives
misses most of the simulation.

I've asked John elsewhere on the board to
repost the FAQ, which may help some.

... If he can't do that, I may still have copies of

Sarah's posts--I'll try to dig them up.

A repost of the FAQ showed up on my server about the time of your request. I
have Sarah's most recent comprehensive essay on the narrative stances; I'll
repost it if people are interested.

Warren J. Dew

[Psychohist]

Taking the quotes out of order for clarity of discussion here (I hope). Kevin
Hardwick posts, in part:

Help me out here Warren--I'm having trouble finding

words to express myself. Does any of this make sense?

I feel like there's something there, but I'm not sure I understand it; there
are a couple of things that are confusing, and on which clarification would be
useful.

1. I'm used to using 'immersive' to mean what used to be called 'deep IC'; I
believe this matches Mary's usage. It's not clear to me whether you're using
it in the same way, or instead using it to refer to the stance that's not
actor, author, or audience - that is, the stance that I started calling
'character stance' at Sarah's suggestion (but that others sometimes still call
'in character stance').

2. It's not clear to me what you mean by 'gamesmaster constraint'. Relating
to your example, does 'providing a constraint' mean providing a yahoo to cut
you off, or does it mean providing the information that unlike in most
situations like this, you lose your cool? Or does it mean reminding you that
you were still feeling frustrated at whatever happened on the previous day?

Regarding that incident, you post:

Now I've never had that happen to me in an rpg. I've
never gotten really po'd, in character, and realized
in-character that it pertained to something that was
frustrating to the character somewhere else.

Again, some clarification would be useful here. Is this because:

- you've never gotten really po'd in character, ever?

- you've gotten really po'd in character, but it's never been because of
something that was frustrating the character somewhere else?

- you've gotten really po'd in character, and realized (as the player) that it
was because of something that was frustrating the character somewhere else, but
the character hasn't realized it?

If the last of these, it seems to me it might be attributable to the fact that
characters are often less introspective than players; it's not clear to me that
the gamesmaster needs to intervene to get the character to introspect.

To give an example, in a recent session, my player character Jennifer lashed
out (verbally) at a gamesmaster character much more vehemently than was
justified by his behavior. I, as Jennifer, got really upset at him - our pack
just done a couple of big favors for him and his cronies, and while
acknowledging that they were favors, he seemed to treat them as his due rather
than being grateful in any way, and he was being unreasonable to boot.

In subsequent in character arguments with her pack mates, I as Jennifer
concluded that I as Jennifer had taken the correct action, and was just
misunderstood. (I as Warren reserved judgement.)

On reading your post, though, Warren concludes that in fact, Jennifer's
reaction was largely due to the fact that she was frustrated by (what she saw
as) one of her packmates getting the pack into a dangerous situation, without
having checked with the pack in advance. Given the circumstances, though, she
wasn't able to lash out at her pack mate, so she lashed out at the gamesmaster
character instead.

I don't see much chance of Jennifer realizing this, though. She's not very
introspective.

In the 'beltway yahoo' example, at what point do you feel that something
cognate to 'gamesmaster constraint' occurred?

Warren Dew

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Edward J. McWalters posts, in part:

> Audience stance entails examining the events of the game
> not as a participant but as a spectator; actor stance is
> concerned with issues like allegory and irony. These are
> issues of major concern to dramatist players, but ones of
> which simulationist players want no part.

I don't agree. One of my very favorite things about relatively
simulationist campaigns is being able to look back on them afterwards
and see themes, ironies, all kinds of complex reflections between
the parts--it is *particularly* the fact that no one was deliberately
creating these things that makes them seem so wonderful to me.

_Paradisio_ was about "What is the boundary between human and
inhuman?" _Radiant_ is about "How do you decide between the demands
of justice and of mercy?" _Sun in Splendor_ and _Sunrise War_
were about "Which takes precedence, the individual or the community?"
(and the two campaigns provided commentary on each other in the
process). These are things I can appreciate from Audience stance.
I just don't deliberately design them into the games, because that
would damage my appreciation--just as, if you really like improv,
you'd be disappointed to find out that that great 'improv' show
was really scripted.

Audience stance, for me, is the player enjoying watching what's
going on in the game--her own parts of it, or other peoples' parts.
I do a lot of it, mainly in interstices between bouts of Immersive
play. I like to ask questions like "What did that NPC think
about what just happened?" and "I wonder what that looked like
to an outsider?" We have an esthetic that says we generally
won't change the game to make it more attractive to the Audience,
but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of fun to be gotten coming
at it from that angle.

Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu

[Triad3204]

In article <6ihsn2$g...@sjx-ixn8.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> writes:

>I think I could take simulationist and dramatist positions to similar
>extremes: "A pure simulationist game doesn't need to bother with individual
>characters, but only with populations, and a pure dramatist game doesn't need
>to bother with individual characters, but only with dramatic archtypes."

It is often true that we take things to extremes in discussing the stances and
positions -- but this is logical, since it is in the extremes that you can most
clearly see the definitions between two stances or positions.

In this case I think you have misjudged the dramatist. Drama does not
necessarily have anything to do with archetypes. IMO, it is the dramatist who
is most concerned with character *as* character -- because character is the
driving force of drama. Simulationists, on the other hand, are going to be more
concerned with characters as solitary elements within the wider simulation (and
the means through which the simulation is observed and manipulated). Gamists
do, I think, as the original poster suggested in rather archaic and
overly-technical language, use characters as their playing pieces -- with each
piece endowed with certain abilities with which you interact with the game the
GM has designed for you.

In reality, of course, there are few absolutes. The dramatist is often
partially a simulationist, the simulationist is often partially a gamist, and
the gamist is often partially a dramatist. I tend to sit somewhere in the
middle of the triangle -- although you will often see me go off on wild
tangents (usually towards the dramatist corner) for certain situations and
genres.

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Triad3204]

In article <354D5734...@wt.infi.net>, "Kevin R. Hardwick"
<krhr...@wt.infi.net> writes:

>What *is* a character, anyway?

Good lord, Kevin. ;-)

I'm just going to snip the rest of your comments (which were all very well
thought out and thought-provoking) and go off on my own tangent. I hope you
won't object.

I think it might be advantageous to look at character as a matter of it's
function *first* and its actuality second. In traditional media, character has
several functions. Let's take a look at those first.

In printed media (books, short stories, etc.) characters are something which
is:
a) created by the author;
b) observed the reader (audience).

In performance media (theater, radio, film/television, etc.) characters are
something which is:
a) created by the playwright (author);
b) embodied by the actor;
c) observed the audience.

In improv performance (primarily theatrical) characters are something which is:
a) created by the actor (acting as author);
b) embodied by the actor;
c) observed by the audience.

What about role-playing games? A character is something which is:
a) created by the player;
b) embodied by the player;
c) observed by other players (acting as audience).

(My often-drawn parallel between improv acting and role-playing draws fruit.
<g>)

So if we look at the overall picture what we are seeing is that characters are
created, embodied, and observed. (It might even be argued that the author has
to create the character and then embody the character; an actor observes and
then embodies the character; and the audience observes either the embodiment of
the author or the embodiment of the actor, depending upon the medium.)

But what is being created, embodied, and observed?

Definition: "A fictional construct which may be used as an identity."

In a role-playing game, actually, you can see broken down into very clear steps
and roles what is generally very muddied in other mediums. For example, in
writing a traditional fiction novel the author must:

a) create a world;
b) create characters who part of that world;
c) embody those characters;
d) present that process (writing);
e) an audience (readers) observes the end result.

The same takes place in theater (for example):

a) the playwright creates a world;
b) the playwright creates characters who are part of that world;
c) the playwright embodies those characters;
d) the playwright presents that process (script);
e) the actor observes the end result;
f) the actor embodies the characters;
g) the actor presents the results;
h) an audience observes the end result.

In a role-playing game all these different roles are given their own, very
specific places within the structure.

a) The GM is clearly given the task of creating a world. (Here a slight
muddying occurs, because the GM is also expected to create characters as part
of that world.)
b) The players are given the task of creating characters in a process referred
to as "character creation" and clearly delineated from the rest of the process.
c) The players and GM then proceed into a stage of "playing the game" -- a
clearly delineated portion seen as the embodiment of characters.

I fear I may have just babbled away for a long time, but I hope that something
worthwhile can be taken from it all.

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Keran]

On 04 May 1998 16:03:51 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
>

> I don't think that the analyis by which I developed the
> stances is biased towards "drama" per se. (Actually, in
> a philosophic sense I do--but in this instance I agree
> with John Kim--I don't think that the philosophic argument
> will help us all that much in this conversation.) The
> metaphor it stems from pertains to narrative--not all
> stage-plays are dramatic, although of course many, even
> most, are.

I was going to agree with Kevin, but I've been thinking about it,
and it seems to me that it may be biased toward drama in one
respect in that I think there may be one stance missing--one
mostly appropriate in games with a significant gamist element.
It's a fundamentally OOC stance in which the attention of the
player is focused on solving a puzzle or overcoming a challenge,
with the character as a playing piece. Probably some people
will say it's part of audience, but I find it very different from
the state in which I watch a story unfold as story. Some readers
assume this stance when they read mysteries.

I spend a lot of time in author and audience stance without it
interfering with my ability to assume the character stance, but
this OOC puzzle-solving position does interfere. As I look back
on it, it seems to have been the reason I never achieved
immersion with some of my characters in other gamemasters'
campaigns--it was called upon too often.

>A repost of the FAQ showed up on my server about the time of your request. I
>have Sarah's most recent comprehensive essay on the narrative stances; I'll
>repost it if people are interested.

Please.

Keran
kera...@mail1.nai.net
http://nw3.nai.net/~keranset/
keranset.telmaron.com 5252

[Magnus L. Hetland]

A charcter is a paradigm of traits, just
like a story is a syntagm of events.

So there. :)

--

Magnus
Lie
Hetland http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~mlh

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <199805050519...@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
tria...@aol.com (Triad3204) wrote:

Gamists may often act this way, but I don't think that treating characters
this way is the central or defining feature of gamism - or of any of the
corners of the triangle. My point was that any of the corners could treat
characters as cardboard stereotypes or as well-developed characters. To say
that gamist 'characters' are cardboard counters while the dramatist and
simulationist play 'real' characters shows a certain bigotry against gamism,
IMHO.

[Psychohist]

Justin Bacon posts, in part:

For example, in writing a traditional fiction novel
the author must:

a) create a world;
b) create characters who part of that world;
c) embody those characters;
d) present that process (writing);
e) an audience (readers) observes the end result.

In a role-playing game all these different roles are

given their own, very specific places within the structure.

a) The GM is clearly given the task of creating a world.
(Here a slight muddying occurs, because the GM is also
expected to create characters as part of that world.)
b) The players are given the task of creating characters
in a process referred to as "character creation" and
clearly delineated from the rest of the process.
c) The players and GM then proceed into a stage of
"playing the game" -- a clearly delineated portion seen
as the embodiment of characters.

I agree with this and think it useful.

I think an interesting point is that the presentation and audience appreciation
phases, while an organic part of the fiction process, are not an organic part
of the role playing process.

In games which are not story oriented, presentation and audience appreciation
are given little weight. This can then change what's appropriate in the three
earlier stages.

Warren Dew

[Brett Evill]

In article
<B59EAF98C11DA3D2.B6655411...@library-proxy.airnews.net>,
kera...@mail1.nai.net (Keran) wrote:

>I was going to agree with Kevin, but I've been thinking about it,
>and it seems to me that it may be biased toward drama in one
>respect in that I think there may be one stance missing--one
>mostly appropriate in games with a significant gamist element.
>It's a fundamentally OOC stance in which the attention of the
>player is focused on solving a puzzle or overcoming a challenge,
>with the character as a playing piece. Probably some people
>will say it's part of audience, but I find it very different from
>the state in which I watch a story unfold as story.

Excellent point. Would you care to name this stance?

[Brett Evill]

In article <6ihsn2$g...@sjx-ixn8.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt

<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>In article <b.evill-0305...@tynslip1.apana.org.au>,
> b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:
>
>>G'day
>>
>>After making my latest contribution to the 'who owns a PC's emotions'
>>thread, I had a thought which I thought worth sharing.
>>
>>The importance of characters to dramatist games is obvious. And in a
>>simulationist game, the character is what the character-player simulates,
>>so that's clear enough. But I have often been puzzled that gamist players
>>bother with the eleborate superstructure of characters, background, and
>>continuity. I have often wondered why gamist GMs do not simply preent a
>>series of 'pop quizzes'. Now I have the glimmering of a thought. Is it
>>that characters, continuity, etc simply provide an interesting set of
>>contraints in a format that is readily described and easily remembered?
>
>What do you mean by "gamist"?
>

>I think I could take simulationist and dramatist positions to similar
>extremes: "A pure simulationist game doesn't need to bother with individual
>characters, but only with populations, and a pure dramatist game doesn't need
>to bother with individual characters, but only with dramatic archtypes."
>

>My understanding of the triangle is that "dramatist" puts priority on game
>events being *dramatic*, that "simulationist" puts priority on game-events
>being *realistic* (in the sense of having logical consistency and
>verisimilitude), and "gamist" puts priority on game-events being *fair* (in
>the sense of characters having a "fair chance" at success & survival).
>
>So a dramatist game needs characters to be dramatic about, a simulationist
>game needs characters as real people in a real world, and a gamist game needs
>characters to be fair to.

Well, I have slight disagreements on several points.

First, concerning simulation. In my professional field, traffic simulation
with computers, the state of the art is moving from flow-based models of
traffic populations to 'micro-simulation' attempting to simulate the
behaviours of individual vehicles. Simulation is quite a different thing
from aggregation.

Second, concerning drama. In competent drama the central characters at
least are individual, and the plot consists of incident arising out of
individual character. Pure 'dramatic archetypes' are for melodrama, fairy
tales, and non-central characters.

Third, concerning games. I believe that the appeal of games lies in
challenge, not in fairness. After all, each person keeping his own money
is fair, but craps or poker are games.

Finally. I note that in you third paragraph you assume the existence of
game-events. This in an inquiry into why game objects exist in the first
place.

These things being the case, I cannot bring myself to agree with you.

[Brett Evill]

In article <6in0ed$8...@dfw-ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt

Yes indeed! The question I was trying to ask in my quaintly archaic and
over-technical language was this: "Why do gamist roleplayers find the
elaborate superstructure of character and continuity useful in pursuing
their ideals"? Why don't they stick to playing their characters as game
pieces, which a superficial investigation would suggest that they should?

[Brett Evill]

In article <354D969E...@wt.infi.net>, krhr...@wt.infi.net wrote:

>In continuing to think about this, I have a question for Mary Kuhner:

>
>As an immersive player, how do you decide when your character feels
>strong emotions?

Such a decision would by definition be made in author stance: that is the
stance in which one makes decisions *about* a character. In immersive
(deep IC) stance, one makes decisions *as* the character.

So an immersive player does not decide to feel strong emotion any more
than the character does, or any person. Such a player just experiences
them.

[Keran]

On Mon, 04 May 1998 13:21:34 -0400, "Kevin R. Hardwick"
<krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

<snip>

<snip>

Can you give an example of a constrained situation that did help you
achieve immersion? I'm not sure precisely what you mean by it yet.

Do you mean you need the GM to pitch situations at your character
that are likely to bring about an emotional reaction?

[Mary K. Kuhner]

In article <354D969E...@wt.infi.net>,

Kevin R. Hardwick <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>In continuing to think about this, I have a question for Mary Kuhner:

>As an immersive player, how do you decide when your character feels
>strong emotions?

Specifically as an Immersive player, I don't decide--observe, more
like. But there's an interesting question of how one gets to that
point with a particular character, since it's almost never possible
right at the start.

I will try to do a separate posting on techniques.

>Leaving aside the question of coercion, which as Brett mentioned may be
>a blind ally anyway, is it ever helpful to you to have the GM suggest an
>emotional state for your character?

Yes, it can be, if the suggestions are delicate enough and inobtrusive
enough that when they're wrong, the game flow isn't broken. We very
routinely suggest dialog for each others' characters, especially in
scenes where more than one PC is speaking: we also sometimes suggest
lines of thought. The trick is to do it so gently that discordances
aren't jarring.

We also do some description-targetted-to-character, though not, I
think, as extensively as your group does. When Vikki walks into a
room the GM describes security problems and power relationships
first; when it's Valentine, he describes physical comfort and
emotional tone of the group first. The player can always say
"Val's nervous enough to look around for the exits before commenting
on the quality of the upholstery" if the default GM understanding
needs refinement.

>I know that in real-life, there are times when I can choose either to
>control or to vent my emotions, and other times when I cannot--when the
>emotions sweep over me, and carry me along, willy-nilly.

>If it is important in a game to replicate that experience--of being
>swept up in emotion (and I must confess that I've never really thought

>about this before)--how do you do that and still stay IC? Isn't it part

>of the actual experience to have the emotion impinge on you externally,
>so to speak? So doesn't it requite either an external suggestion to
>make that happen, or else for you to drop the IC stance and make an
>authorial decision?

I don't tend to perceive my own emotions as external (my one
experience with this, due to drugs, was intensely disturbing
to me). They may be inexplicable and unexpected, but they are
subjectively internal. It's like feeling a sudden cramp in your
leg--you may have no idea why it's cramping, but something about
the experience suggests it's inside your leg, not a small animal
biting your calf.

My criteria for saying "Yes, that was Immersion" include being able
to be swept up in the character's emotions without necessarily
understanding, predicting, or authoring them. If I have to use
Authorial reasoning (as I generally do with my character Vikki, whose
head I just can't seem to get inside) I don't consider it Immersion.
(I don't think Vikki is a bad character, necessarily, but the
process of running her feels quite different.)

I think the most shocked I ever was by a character's emotions was
in a PBeM, where my character Catalina was offered magic (her lifelong
desire) and refused it. Since the game was in written form, I have
her description:

"It was as if there was a blade of steel within me, and I never knew
it until I tried to bend [to accept the offer] and it cut me to the
bone."

I remember quite distinctly how that felt, and it shocked me completely:
I hadn't thought she'd refuse, and I'd had no idea how it would feel
to do so. (Painful. Really, really painful; I don't think I'd want
to tackle anything more intense than that Immersively.) It was almost
physical: I'd localize the "blade" she was speaking of somewhere
near the breastbone. There was a distinct sense not only of
distress but of *damage*, something being mangled inside her.

It hadn't occured to me before, but I would probably have trouble
playing a character whose emotions *did* appear to her as external
forces. Vikki may be somewhat like this, due to the discordance
between her biology and her upbringing: her "human" emotions that
lack a Rastur analog tend to seem alien to her, and in fact
she often blames them on someone around her. ("Sanjay is
trying to influence my mind, and that is why I feel like this.")
I don't have much insight into this kind of thinking, which may
be part of why I don't have much intuitive insight into Vikki.
(On the other hand, as Jon points out, it may be a combination
of very alien worldview and inadequate spotlight time.)

Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Magnus L. Hetland wrote:

> A charcter is a paradigm of traits, just
> like a story is a syntagm of events.
>
> So there. :)

Magnus! Gracious--haven't heard from you in a while.

I tried to get in touch with you via email some years ago and could
not--I don't remember what the issue was, save it pertained to wanting
your assistance in figuring out some dramatist problem or other.

Anyway, can you expand on the above--its a bit cryptic . . .

My best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

My apologies to the board--I've had a family emergency crop up--I'm
going to have a tough time holding up my end of the conversation for a
few days--I'll contribute as I can.

Kevin

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0605...@tynslip1.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>In article <6ihsn2$g...@sjx-ixn8.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
><er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>

>>I think I could take simulationist and dramatist positions to similar
>>extremes: "A pure simulationist game doesn't need to bother with individual
>>characters, but only with populations, and a pure dramatist game doesn't
need
>>to bother with individual characters, but only with dramatic archtypes."

I didn't make clear, here, that I considered the simulationist-without
character and dramatist-without-character positions to be *ridiculous*
extremes. The point I was trying to make is that the gamist-without-character
position is equally ridiculous.

>>
>>My understanding of the triangle is that "dramatist" puts priority on game
>>events being *dramatic*, that "simulationist" puts priority on game-events
>>being *realistic* (in the sense of having logical consistency and
>>verisimilitude), and "gamist" puts priority on game-events being *fair* (in
>>the sense of characters having a "fair chance" at success & survival).
>>
>>So a dramatist game needs characters to be dramatic about, a simulationist
>>game needs characters as real people in a real world, and a gamist game
needs
>>characters to be fair to.

>
>Well, I have slight disagreements on several points.
>

[snip serious rebuttal of my intended-to-be-silly "characterless"
simulationist and dramatist positions.]

>
>Third, concerning games. I believe that the appeal of games lies in
>challenge, not in fairness. After all, each person keeping his own money
>is fair, but craps or poker are games.

Just because keeping ones own money is fair doesn't mean that redistributing
money cannot also be fair. And I see no challenge in craps - yet as you say,
craps is a game.

>
>Finally. I note that in you third paragraph you assume the existence of
>game-events. This in an inquiry into why game objects exist in the first
>place.

Because it is silly for a pure gamist RPG to exist without characters - just
like it is silly for a pure dramatist or pure simulationist RPG to exist
without characters.

>
>These things being the case, I cannot bring myself to agree with you.

Again, what do you mean by 'gamist'? I think our disagreement stems from
our having two different meanings for that term.

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0605...@tynslip1.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>In article <6in0ed$8...@dfw-ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
><er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>>
>>Gamists may often act this way, but I don't think that treating characters
>>this way is the central or defining feature of gamism - or of any of the
>>corners of the triangle. My point was that any of the corners could treat
>>characters as cardboard stereotypes or as well-developed characters. To say
>>that gamist 'characters' are cardboard counters while the dramatist and
>>simulationist play 'real' characters shows a certain bigotry against
gamism,
>>IMHO.
>
>Yes indeed! The question I was trying to ask in my quaintly archaic and
>over-technical language was this: "Why do gamist roleplayers find the
>elaborate superstructure of character and continuity useful in pursuing
>their ideals"? Why don't they stick to playing their characters as game
>pieces, which a superficial investigation would suggest that they should?
>

They do play their characters as game pieces. But it is a complex and
intricate game they play, one that requires complex and intricate game pieces
that have an "elaborate superstructure of character and continuity."

What hit my hot-button was the idea of gamist players not bothering with
characters at all, even as game pieces, but rather answering "pop quizes"
from the GM directly.

Role-playing is fun, which is why one can see examples of roleplaying even in
full-out wargames. As long as the roleplaying elements beloved by
simulationists and dramatists don't interfere with the game-as-game, there
isn't any reason why even 'pure' gamists should disallow them.

The corners of the three-fold are about priorities, not about completely
excluding all elements of the other two corners. This is true for the gamist
corner as much as for the other two. A dramatist game will allow simulation,
as long as the simulation doesn't interfere with the drama, and a
simulationist game will allow drama, as long as the drama doesn't interfere
with the simulation. Why then *shouldn't* a gamist game allow simulation and
drama as long as they don't interfere with the gamist concerns?

[Magnus L. Hetland]

> Magnus L. Hetland wrote:
>
> > A charcter is a paradigm of traits, just
> > like a story is a syntagm of events.
> >
> > So there. :)
>
> Magnus! Gracious--haven't heard from you in a while.
>

No, well... I guess I kind of faded out for a while. I've been
lurking around, but it seems that there has been a period
of more system-related (etc.) discussions that I haven't really
been all that interested in...

> I tried to get in touch with you via email some years ago and could
> not--

Strange... I have had my account here all the time (though
the "idt"-part of my adress has changed to "idi", but I think
there is a forwarding mechanism. Or maybe you had the old
"lise.unit.no"-thing... Oh well, here I am ;)

> I don't remember what the issue was, save it pertained to wanting
> your assistance in figuring out some dramatist problem or other.

I'm flattered :)

>
> Anyway, can you expand on the above--its a bit cryptic . . .
>

OK. I guess my statement might not be very helpful in this context,
but at least it may be a starting point. It is, basically, a
(not necessarily *the*) narratological definition of character.
(Taken from Seymour Chatman or whatever his name is...)

A _syntagm_ is a set of elements put together in a sequence,
while a _paradigm_ is just a pile of elements, existing "sort of
like" in a perpendicular to the syntagmatic dimension. So...

A story is a syntagm of events:

A -> B -> C

... While a character is a paradigm of traits:

A + B + C

Of course the paradigm may change in the course of the story etc.
A trait is defined something along the lines of a persistent
attribute that differentiates the character from others. So it
includes personality traits etc., and basically all of what is
used in RPG systems to describe a character, but not emotions
etc. as they are not persistent.

Of course emotions etc. are important in characterising a character,
but mainly by suggesting more persistents traits.

> My best,
> Kevin
>

(It's good to be back ;)

[Brett Evill]

In article <6ipjms$m...@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>I didn't make clear, here, that I considered the simulationist-without
>character and dramatist-without-character positions to be *ridiculous*
>extremes. The point I was trying to make is that the gamist-without-character
>position is equally ridiculous.

A lot of games get along fine without characters. Chess, Monopoly, Go,
bridge. They just aren't role-playing games.

Now there are some people out there, like Sandy Petersen, for instance,
and Greg Costikyan, who believe that RPGs are best understood, designed
etc. by considering them to be members of the same class with Monopoly
etc. Some of these people (Sandy Petersen, for example) make vociferous
attacks on people who, as I did, say that they think RPGs are best
considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime. These people attempt to
bulldoze the conversation by insisting that RPGs aren't stories, they are
*games*. (Never mind that I, for example, never said that they are
stories.) Then they typically go on to cite something by von Neuman on the
branch of mathematics known as game theory, and insist that all games are
contests embodying opposition between the players.

These are the people I am used to considering gamists.

>Again, what do you mean by 'gamist'? I think our disagreement stems from
>our having two different meanings for that term.

Very likely.

[Red]

Psychohist wrote:

> I seem to recall Sarah Kahn mentioning that she played in some games that were
> not particularly dramatic, but pretty clearly fell in the style that's now
> called 'dramatist' - one of the reasons why I prefer the term 'story oriented'.
>
> I think that in a very fundamental way, world oriented simulations cannot be
> viewed as narratives - or to put it another way, viewing them as narratives
> misses most of the simulation.
>

I find, as I read this discussion, that I am having trouble identifying
the distinction between "dramatist" and "simulationist" play styles.
Now, when I run a game, I do so from a narrative outlook - I go out amnd
set up pins for the PC's to knock down. However, I have a simulationist
world view, so that the pins I set up do not have scripted bahaviour;
they act as individuals in the world at large. I then "run" these NPC's
or whatever according to their goals within the initial world setting;
the players do the same.

The reason for this confusion is that I see a distinction between the
world, as a discrete entity largely objective for all game characters,
and the narrative, which is the action "on the screen" and which I
consciously tune in order to achieve a narrative result. This is also a
feature of our contract, in that I expect my players to treat the game
world as objective, and that is how I implement it for NPC's etc; but I
feel free to select the most interesting of several possible outcomes.

In this respect, I see a distinction between my style when running the
game itself, and my style when modelling the characters interactions
with the world (which itself is a compnent of running the game). Maybe
I'm just missing some terminology here, so I would invite any remarks on
the topic.

[Red]

Triad3204 wrote:

> Definition: "A fictional construct which may be used as an identity."
>

That seems like a usefully succinct definition. Characters can vary
quite extensively; we have had some discussion as to whether starships
could be PC's (and I think they can). The only real limit on
characters, I think, is that they must have *opinions*; they are the
viewing platform for the world becuase they are capable of forming
opinions about the world, based on their participation in the world.
Beyond demanding that the characters be thinking creatures, capable of
expressing cogito ergo sum, we are very open to the how's and why's of a
character's existence; we do not demand any link (in general terms)
between RL and characters beyond their sapience.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

In article <b.evill-0305...@tynslip1.apana.org.au>,
Brett Evill <b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au> wrote:

>The importance of characters to dramatist games is obvious. And in a
>simulationist game, the character is what the character-player simulates,
>so that's clear enough. But I have often been puzzled that gamist players
>bother with the eleborate superstructure of characters, background, and
>continuity. I have often wondered why gamist GMs do not simply preent a
>series of 'pop quizzes'. Now I have the glimmering of a thought. Is it
>that characters, continuity, etc simply provide an interesting set of
>contraints in a format that is readily described and easily remembered?

The character in a strongly gamist game is, among other things,
a score-keeping device: my success in the game is demonstrated by the
fact that I now have a character with advanced attributes (high
level, lots of possessions, social status, etc.) On this level your
question is analogous to "Why do chessplayers bother with tournaments
and ratings, rather than simply playing chess?"

There's also a GM reason: good "pop quiz" scenarios are hell to
come up with compared to scenarios with a little more cohesion.
I ran a Shadowrun game briefly for a player who just wanted to do
burglaries, with no plot thread linking them, no continuing
enemies, no particular rationale. It was exhausting to come up
with these scenarios, and I kept pushing a plotline simply because
it would make it much easier to prepare. (Okay, he has the
Cartel mad at him, so I can do some Cartel thugs, and then a
Cartel hitman, and then a Cartel hit team. Also a bounty hunter
looking for the Cartel who finds him instead, and....)

Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu

[Brian Gleichman]

Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@evolution.genetics.washington.edu> wrote in
article <6iqd01$p5e$1...@nntp5.u.washington.edu>...

> The character in a strongly gamist game is, among other things,
> a score-keeping device: my success in the game is demonstrated by the
> fact that I now have a character with advanced attributes (high
> level, lots of possessions, social status, etc.)

<snip>

> There's also a GM reason: good "pop quiz" scenarios are hell to
> come up with compared to scenarios with a little more cohesion.

In addition to the above, I'd like to throw out a couple of other reasons.
After all, I'm one of the few here willing to admit to valuing gamist
concerns.

Characters and campaign background give reason for the game and make
attempting the challenge more interesting by far.

For example, one can play football. Which is more intense, a typical game
or one against hated rivals? And isn't it easier to have hated rivals when
you have characters and history?

As another point, Gamist originally (does it still?) included the concept
of 'challenge'. Playing from the perspective of a full character in a full
campaign offers some of the greatest challenges I can think of.

[Zoran Bekric]

Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) wrote:

>I was going to agree with Kevin, but I've been thinking about it,
>and it seems to me that it may be biased toward drama in one
>respect in that I think there may be one stance missing--one
>mostly appropriate in games with a significant gamist element.
>It's a fundamentally OOC stance in which the attention of the
>player is focused on solving a puzzle or overcoming a challenge,
>with the character as a playing piece. Probably some people
>will say it's part of audience, but I find it very different from

>the state in which I watch a story unfold as story. Some readers
>assume this stance when they read mysteries.

Um...
If this is the stance some people assume when reading (or watching) a
mystery, then why isn't it Audience Stance?

I know that I sometimes just sit there and allow a story to flow over me
and at other times I'm actively interrogating the story as it unfolds,
noting new facts as they are revealed and constantly recasting my
understanding of earlier events in the light of new information. I
consider both to be Audience Stance -- one passive and one active, to be
sure -- but Audience Stance, nevertheless. If anything, I spend most of my
audience time in the active mode, trying to anticipate events, admiring a
well-turned phrase asking 'Why did they do that?' and so on. Very rarely
do I just passively absorb a story. Others may differ in this regard, of
course.

However, that said, I think that Keran has identified a different stance.
Rather than reading mystery stories, I would liken the stance to that
adopted when one is playing a computer (so-called) role-playing game.

I remember being introduced to such a game called (I think) 'Alone in the
Dark' which involved controlling the actions of a character who starts off
in the attic of a haunted house and who has to make her way to the
basement while avoiding various beasties and disasters and uncovering
assorted clues along the way. As I discovered, the first thing to do on
gaining control of the character (who I'm sure had a name, but I can't
remember it) was to slide a large trunk over the top of a trapdoor in the
floor of the attic and then to push a wardrobe in front of the attic
window. If one didn't do these things, a monster would come up through the
trapdoor and kill the character or a different monster would come in
through the window and kill the character. One would learn to avoid such
things through trial-and-error. That is, the character would be killed and
you would go back to the beginning of the game (or back to the last time
you had saved it) and proceed forward again, trying different things to
try and avoid whatever it was that killed the character last time.

The stance adopted by the player of such a game is clearly not Author (the
player has only the most limited control over the narrative), not Audience
(the player has to actively cause events in the narrative for it to
proceed, they can not just watch the story unfold) and not Actor or
Character (the character in the narrative keeps dying). This last aspect
can not be overstated. The PLAYER learns through trial-and-error, the
CHARACTER keeps dying. Even once the player has learnt to push the trunk
over the trapdoor in the attic, etc., there is *no way* that the character
could have known that. The player only knows it because they had lost
previous characters to that trap. It's a classic case of players using
Out-of-Character knowledge to determine In-Character actions -- which is
generally regarded as bad roleplaying in table top games, but is the
central feature of computer role-playing games.

In such games, the Character is literally only an elaborate playing piece,
pushed around on the playing board by the player to achieve only the
player's goals (solving the puzzle, getting the high score, etc.), not the
character's goals. In fact, the character is not even assumed to have
goals.

This, I think, is a lot closer to what Keran is talking about.

>I spend a lot of time in author and audience stance without it
>interfering with my ability to assume the character stance, but
>this OOC puzzle-solving position does interfere. As I look back
>on it, it seems to have been the reason I never achieved
>immersion with some of my characters in other gamemasters'
>campaigns--it was called upon too often.

Precisely. Identifying -- let alone achieving immersion -- with a
character in a computer role-playing game is not only counter-productive
(you do not advance through the game), but it is also effectively
impossible. Often having the character do psychologically appropriate
things given their experiences and circumstances is impossible -- such
actions are simply not available as options. The *only* way to approach
such games is as a player of a computer game.

Brett Evill <b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au> wrote:

>Excellent point. Would you care to name this stance?

Given the above, may I suggest CRPG Stance? I have no idea how to
pronounce this -- except, possibly, through some variation of 'Creep.'

Regards,

Zoran

--
Zoran Bekric
(zbe...@hempseed.com)
ars longa, vita brevis

[Psychohist]

'Red' posts, in part:

I find, as I read this discussion, that I am
having trouble identifying the distinction
between "dramatist" and "simulationist" play

styles....

I see a distinction between the world, as a
discrete entity largely objective for all game
characters, and the narrative, which is the
action "on the screen" and which I consciously
tune in order to achieve a narrative result.
This is also a feature of our contract, in that
I expect my players to treat the game world as
objective, and that is how I implement it for
NPC's etc; but I feel free to select the most
interesting of several possible outcomes.

In this respect, I see a distinction between my
style when running the game itself, and my style
when modelling the characters interactions with
the world (which itself is a compnent of running
the game). Maybe I'm just missing some terminology
here, so I would invite any remarks on the topic.

I'd say you're about midway between the story oriented and world oriented
extremes - there's a big grey area here.

For a more strictly world oriented approach, imagine never being willing to
select between several possible outcomes on the basis of which is 'most
interesting'. For a more strictly story oriented approach, imagine feeling
obligated to always select between possible outcomes on that basis.

Warren Dew

[Psychohist]

In response to Keran:

I was going to agree with Kevin, but I've been thinking
about it, and it seems to me that it may be biased toward
drama in one respect in that I think there may be one
stance missing--one mostly appropriate in games with a
significant gamist element. It's a fundamentally OOC
stance in which the attention of the player is focused on
solving a puzzle or overcoming a challenge, with the
character as a playing piece. Probably some people will
say it's part of audience, but I find it very different
from the state in which I watch a story unfold as story.
Some readers assume this stance when they read mysteries.

Zoran Bekric posts, in part:

Um...
If this is the stance some people assume when reading
(or watching) a mystery, then why isn't it Audience
Stance?

However, that said, I think that Keran has identified

a different stance. Rather than reading mystery stories,
I would liken the stance to that adopted when one is
playing a computer (so-called) role-playing game.

I think that's too specific. Some computer roleplaying games clearly involve
character stance behavior as well.

I can, however, propose an activity that is an almost pure embodiment of the
'problem solving' stance that Keran is proposing: solving a crossword puzzle.

A crossword puzzle has a defined 'correct' answer, so there's no scope for
authorial activity. There's no character, so one can't solve it from the
character stance, or even portray it from the actor stance.

I'm still not sure whether this is a separate stance, or just an active extreme
of the audience stance. I wish Sarah were around to provide her comments.

Warren Dew

[Triad3204]

In article <6in0ed$8...@dfw-ixnews2.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> writes:

>Gamists may often act this way, but I don't think that treating characters
>this way is the central or defining feature of gamism - or of any of the
>corners of the triangle. My point was that any of the corners could treat
>characters as cardboard stereotypes or as well-developed characters. To say
>that gamist 'characters' are cardboard counters while the dramatist and
>simulationist play 'real' characters shows a certain bigotry against gamism,
>IMHO.

Depends on your point of view -- *I* don't have any problem with people playing
cardboard cut-outs if that's what they enjoy. Aren't you the one with the
bigotry that "well-developed characters" are necessary to a good RPG
experience?

But -- putting that aside -- I also think you're wrong. Dramatists are
interested in drama, drama is motivated by character -- hence the need for deep
characters. Simulationists attempt to simulate reality, reality has realistic
people in it -- hence the need for realistic characters. Gamists are interested
in the game, the game requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
does not require a personality.

However, since there is no such thing as a "pure" dramatist, a "pure"
simulationist, or a "pure" gamist, there are many people who can safely be
described as "gamists" who also play deep and/or realistic characters because
they have elements of the dramatist of simulationist stance in them.

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Red]

Magnus L. Hetland wrote:

> A _syntagm_ is a set of elements put together in a sequence,
> while a _paradigm_ is just a pile of elements, existing "sort of
> like" in a perpendicular to the syntagmatic dimension. So...
>
> A story is a syntagm of events:
>
> A -> B -> C
>
> ... While a character is a paradigm of traits:
>
> A + B + C
>

Hmm, very interesting. Is there any formal structure for the
ENVIRONMENT in which nrratives take place, or is the exposition of a
location taken to be an event?

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0705...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>In article <6ipjms$m...@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
><er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I didn't make clear, here, that I considered the simulationist-without
>>character and dramatist-without-character positions to be *ridiculous*
>>extremes. The point I was trying to make is that the gamist-without

character
>>position is equally ridiculous.
>
>A lot of games get along fine without characters. Chess, Monopoly, Go,
>bridge. They just aren't role-playing games.

Exactly. We were, I thought, talking about role-playing games here. IMHO
trying to fit Chess, Monopoly, Bridge, etc. into the three-fold is as off the
wall as trying to fit traditional storytelling or traffic-flow simulations
into the three-fold.

>
>Now there are some people out there, like Sandy Petersen, for instance,
>and Greg Costikyan, who believe that RPGs are best understood, designed
>etc. by considering them to be members of the same class with Monopoly
>etc. Some of these people (Sandy Petersen, for example) make vociferous
>attacks on people who, as I did, say that they think RPGs are best
>considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime. These people attempt to
>bulldoze the conversation by insisting that RPGs aren't stories, they are
>*games*.

My own view is that RPGs are best understood as being a hybrid form. I
disagree with the view that they're 'pure' games in the same class as
Monopoly, but I've also made vociferous attacks myself against people who
think that they're best considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime.
<rant> IMNSHO, if one cuts roleplaying off from it's gaming roots, the result
is not a role-playing game as I understand the term. It is a role-playing
something-else - something that is as different from a role-playing-game as a
role-playing-game is from miniature wargaming. </rant>

>Never mind that I, for example, never said that they are
>stories.) Then they typically go on to cite something by von Neuman on the
>branch of mathematics known as game theory, and insist that all games are
>contests embodying opposition between the players.

Well, yes. I've argued along these lines myself - that roleplaying is no
longer a role-playing *game* if there isn't a certain minimum amount of
opposition between the players and the GM.

>
>These are the people I am used to considering gamists.
>
>>Again, what do you mean by 'gamist'? I think our disagreement stems from
>>our having two different meanings for that term.
>
>Very likely.

Um, maybe not, on second though. You've tagged 'gamists' as people who think
that all roleplaying games are games (or at least all those RPG that are
worthy of the name). But this doesn't imply that all games are roleplaying
games, even in the minds of gamists - and if I understand you correctly, you
are wondering why this is so. Look at it from another corner: If you think
that RPG's are best considered as a narrative or dramatic pasttime, does this
mean that you believe *all* narrative and dramatic pasttimes are RPGs? Does
going out and watching a movie belong in the threefold?

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <199805070615...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
tria...@aol.com (Triad3204) wrote:

>But -- putting that aside -- I also think you're wrong. Dramatists are
>interested in drama, drama is motivated by character -- hence the need for
deep
>characters.

No, hence the need for characters - but not necessarily the need for "deep"
characters. Are the characters in, say, Commedia Dell'Arte "deep" characters?
Or is Commedia Dell'Arte not drama?

>Simulationists attempt to simulate reality, reality has realistic
>people in it -- hence the need for realistic characters.

Simulationists don't always attempt to simulate reality - often they attempt
to simulate genre settings. And simulations outside of the rpg threefold may
not bother with realistic people at all - they may use Homo economius from
econonimics or they may abstract people into populations.

>Gamists are interested
>in the game, the game requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
>does not require a personality.

And in a roleplaying game, the problems exist in a gameworld and the means of
solving those problems are characters within that gameworld. Something that
lacks a gameworld and characters may be a game, but it isn't a roleplaying
game. There are non-roleplaying games that don't fit into the threefold, just
like there is non-roleplaying simulation that doesn't fit into the threefold
and non-roleplaying drama that doesn't fit into the threefold.

[zbe...@hempseed.com]

Warren Dew (psych...@aol.com (Psychohist)) wrote:

>In response to Keran:

>
>>I was going to agree with Kevin, but I've been thinking
>>about it, and it seems to me that it may be biased toward
>>drama in one respect in that I think there may be one
>>stance missing--one mostly appropriate in games with a
>>significant gamist element. It's a fundamentally OOC
>>stance in which the attention of the player is focused on
>>solving a puzzle or overcoming a challenge, with the
>>character as a playing piece. Probably some people will
>>say it's part of audience, but I find it very different
>>from the state in which I watch a story unfold as story.
>>Some readers assume this stance when they read mysteries.
>

>Zoran Bekric posts, in part:
>

>>Um...
>>If this is the stance some people assume when reading
>>(or watching) a mystery, then why isn't it Audience
>>Stance?
>>

>>However, that said, I think that Keran has identified
>>a different stance. Rather than reading mystery stories,
>>I would liken the stance to that adopted when one is
>>playing a computer (so-called) role-playing game.
>

>I think that's too specific. Some computer roleplaying games clearly involve
>character stance behavior as well.

I'll have to defer to your greater experience here. Could you
recommend such a game -- I've been looking for one for
ages. In my experience, computer role-playing games give
the player only a limited range of options and, to the extent
that my interpretation of a character's motives and
psychology prompts me to want to do something outside
of that range of options, I find I can't do it. That is, I can't
actually play in character mode.

(In other games I find approaching things in character mode
is actually punished -- 'The Assyrians offered me a treaty
when everyone else declared war on me, giving me one
secure border and allowing me to concentrate my forces on
defending my other borders. I am grateful for this and will
respect their territory and will come to their aid when they
are attacked.' In my experience, the computer AI -- or
whatever -- acting as GM doesn't seem to be able to grasp
this kind of motivation, since it won't let me 'win' the
game until I conquer the Assyrians. Phooey!)

>I can, however, propose an activity that is an almost pure embodiment of the
>'problem solving' stance that Keran is proposing: solving a crossword puzzle.
>
>A crossword puzzle has a defined 'correct' answer, so there's no scope for
>authorial activity. There's no character, so one can't solve it from the
>character stance, or even portray it from the actor stance.

Actually Crossword puzzles occurred to me as an example,
as did Jigsaw puzzles, Mazes and a few other activities.
This may have been what Keran meant, but I don't think
they work as exemplars for what I was talking about for
the very reason you identify: there is only _one_ 'correct'
answer. This is rarely the case in RPGs.

Whether a player's goals are to gather enough xp's this
session to advance to the next level, have the strongest/
toughest character in the party or finally capture the
recurring villain this session, there are usually multiple
ways of achieving the goal. There is no *one* answer;
often there is not even a *single* optimal answer. Games
and GMs who give a player only one possible path towards
an answer are generally condemned for 'railroading' the
player.

An activity that does approach this better is wargaming. In
a wargame a player is given a goal (capture the
ammunition dump) and a set of tools to accomplish that
goal (2 rifle companies and a small squadron of 5 tanks),
but how they go about using those tools to achieve the
goal is entirely up to the player. Given that RPGs evolved
out of wargames, this analogy is probably the most
historically accurate.

Moving sideways, another example would be a card game
such as Poker. Here again, a player has a specific goal (to
win the pot), but has a variety of means of doing so
(having the best hand, bluffing the other players, out-
spending the other players or some combination of all
three).

What distinguishes this stance is that
i) there is no single 'correct' answer and
ii) a degree of genuine creativity is required on the part of
the player to devise and then implement an answer.

>I'm still not sure whether this is a separate stance, or just an active extreme
>of the audience stance. I wish Sarah were around to provide her comments.

I think it's a separate stance. Playing a wargame or poker
or even solving a crossword puzzle, jigsaw puzzle or maze
is a very different experience to watching a play, a film or a
television program, reading a book or even listening to a
record.

Regards,

Zoran

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading

[Brett Evill]

In article <35518BC2...@hotmail.com>, Red
<red_arm...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Hmm, very interesting. Is there any formal structure for the
>ENVIRONMENT in which nrratives take place, or is the exposition of a
>location taken to be an event?

Interesting question. But is description part of narrative at all? Don't
you find that in some works description interferes with the flow of
narrative?

[Psychohist]

Zoran Bekric posts, in part:

I'll have to defer to your greater experience here.

Could you recommend such a game -- I've been looking
for one for ages. In my experience, computer role-playing
games give the player only a limited range of options and,
to the extent that my interpretation of a character's
motives and psychology prompts me to want to do something
outside of that range of options, I find I can't do it.
That is, I can't actually play in character mode.

This is a little off track, but I'd suggest starting with "Mission:
Thunderbolt". Rights have reverted to the author, but he still sells it; I can
email info if you want.

Now, there is still a limited range of options, but that's arguably true for
human gamesmasters as well. And it's true that you necessarily start with a
commando character, so a character concept too far away from that probably
won't work.

But it does allow for a wide range of approaches. You can try to kill
everything in sight. You can try to gain allies to help you out. You can try
to avoid all the obstacles.

I know that back when it first came out, players often discussed the varying
personalities of their characters.

Two last notes: the style is still pretty close to the game oriented corner of
the triangle, and I think the game works better for develop in play types.

Regarding the active not-quite-audience stance:

Actually Crossword puzzles occurred to me as an example,
as did Jigsaw puzzles, Mazes and a few other activities.
This may have been what Keran meant, but I don't think
they work as exemplars for what I was talking about for
the very reason you identify: there is only _one_ 'correct'
answer. This is rarely the case in RPGs.

I think we're getting back to the stance versus style issue here. I think the
general approach that you are describe in the rest of your post is more a
description of the game oriented style than a description of separate stance.

Remember that a player is thought not to use any one stance all the time.
Rather, the model is that the player switches back and forth between actor,
audience, author, and character stances, and perhaps this one we're talking
about.

If there's a stance here, I think it does involve looking at problems as having
a 'right' answer. One might only get close - it's tough to be sure one has
perfectly optimized one's point usage in Champions, say - but the player is
trying to get as close as possible.

As a basis for discussion, I'd suggest calling this 'analyst stance'.
Comments, anyone?

Warren Dew

[Brett Evill]

In article <6is9d5$k...@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>In article <b.evill-0705...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
> b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:
>
>>In article <6ipjms$m...@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
>><er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I didn't make clear, here, that I considered the simulationist-without
>>>character and dramatist-without-character positions to be *ridiculous*
>>>extremes. The point I was trying to make is that the gamist-without
>character
>>>position is equally ridiculous.
>>
>>A lot of games get along fine without characters. Chess, Monopoly, Go,
>>bridge. They just aren't role-playing games.
>
>Exactly. We were, I thought, talking about role-playing games here. IMHO
>trying to fit Chess, Monopoly, Bridge, etc. into the three-fold is as off the
>wall as trying to fit traditional storytelling or traffic-flow simulations
>into the three-fold.

The statement above is part of a connected argument. Attempting to rebut
it out of context like this is asinine.

>>Now there are some people out there, like Sandy Petersen, for instance,
>>and Greg Costikyan, who believe that RPGs are best understood, designed
>>etc. by considering them to be members of the same class with Monopoly
>>etc. Some of these people (Sandy Petersen, for example) make vociferous
>>attacks on people who, as I did, say that they think RPGs are best
>>considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime. These people attempt to
>>bulldoze the conversation by insisting that RPGs aren't stories, they are
>>*games*.
>
>My own view is that RPGs are best understood as being a hybrid form. I
>disagree with the view that they're 'pure' games in the same class as
>Monopoly, but I've also made vociferous attacks myself against people who
>think that they're best considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime.

><rant> IMNSHO, if one cuts roleplaying off from it's gaming roots, the result
>is not a role-playing game as I understand the term. It is a role-playing
>something-else - something that is as different from a role-playing-game as a
>role-playing-game is from miniature wargaming. </rant>

Fortunately for us, your understanding of the term is not such a
conversational trump as you seem to think. There are plenty of people
using this newsgroup who play RPGs without a significant element of
competition. That you consider us beyond the pale is of no interests
whatever.

>>Never mind that I, for example, never said that they are
>>stories.) Then they typically go on to cite something by von Neuman on the
>>branch of mathematics known as game theory, and insist that all games are
>>contests embodying opposition between the players.
>
>Well, yes. I've argued along these lines myself - that roleplaying is no
>longer a role-playing *game* if there isn't a certain minimum amount of
>opposition between the players and the GM.

Well, since you argued it once, I suppose that we are all obliged to agree.

>>These are the people I am used to considering gamists.
>>
>>>Again, what do you mean by 'gamist'? I think our disagreement stems from
>>>our having two different meanings for that term.
>>
>>Very likely.
>
>Um, maybe not, on second though. You've tagged 'gamists' as people who think
>that all roleplaying games are games (or at least all those RPG that are
>worthy of the name). But this doesn't imply that all games are roleplaying
>games, even in the minds of gamists - and if I understand you correctly, you
>are wondering why this is so.

Then I appears that I have not made myself clear. My point is not a
trivial error in a syllogism.

Let me try again. A model of RPGs that makes them fundamentally a form of
simulation of worlds and people obviously implies that they must contain
characters. A model of RPGs that makes them a form of collaborative
narrative obviously implies the existence of characters. But there are
lots of other forms of competitive game that get along fine without
characters. So a model of RPGs that makes them a form of competition does
not obviously imply that they should contain characters. But gamist RPGs
do contain characters. So do the characters deliver something that
contributes to the gamist aesthetic? If so, what? Or is it just that even
roleplayers with strong gamist leanings appreciate a dash of dramatism and
simulationism for synergic effects in their games?

> Look at it from another corner: If you think
>that RPG's are best considered as a narrative or dramatic pasttime, does this
>mean that you believe *all* narrative and dramatic pasttimes are RPGs? Does
>going out and watching a movie belong in the threefold?

Certainly not. I cannot understand how you got to this patently absurd
proposition.

I accused certain other people of arguing (1) All games are contests (2)
RPGs are games, therefore (3) RPGs are contests. This argument is
logically sound: it just happens that I don't accept its conclusion
because I disagree with its major premise. You write as though I had
argued (1) all RPGs are narrative, therefore (2) all narratives are RPGs.
And I cannot see where I wrote anything of the sort.

[Brett Evill]

In article <6isaqs$1...@sjx-ixn1.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>And in a roleplaying game, the problems exist in a gameworld and the means of
>solving those problems are characters within that gameworld. Something that
>lacks a gameworld and characters may be a game, but it isn't a roleplaying
>game. There are non-roleplaying games that don't fit into the threefold, just
>like there is non-roleplaying simulation that doesn't fit into the threefold
>and non-roleplaying drama that doesn't fit into the threefold.

Yes, everyone recognises that. What we are discussing is *why* it is true.
Why do roleplayers with strong gamist inclinations embed their puzzles in
a gameworld? Does it contribute to the essentially gamist enjoyment in
some way, and if so, how? Or is it that even the most gamist of
roleplayers partake in part of the dramatist and simulationist aesthetics?

Given that there are non-roleplaying games out there that seem to cater
perfectly to the gamist aesthetic, why are supposed extreme gamists like
Sandy Petersen still playing roleplaying games?

It simply isn't adequate to say "if they dropped the characters and
settings it wouldn't be RP any more"- because there is nothing forcing
these people to play RP games rather than some other sort.

I ask 'if the gamists appreciate what they say they appreciate, how come
they are playing RPGs and not wargames' (and it's a genuine enquiry, not a
jibe). You answer 'wargames are not RPGs'. It isn't a useful contribution
to the debate.

[Robin Adams]

zbe...@hempseed.com wrote:

: I'll have to defer to your greater experience here. Could you

: recommend such a game -- I've been looking for one for
: ages. In my experience, computer role-playing games give
: the player only a limited range of options and, to the extent
: that my interpretation of a character's motives and
: psychology prompts me to want to do something outside
: of that range of options, I find I can't do it. That is, I can't
: actually play in character mode.

The obvious choice would be the Ultima games - in particular, numbers 4
to 7. (You can get the Ultima Collection in the shops at the moment,
which has all 8 games). You can *definitely* play in character mode -
you can go anywhere in the world you want, you can have long
conversations with NPCs, and almost every object you find can be used
in some way, whether you need to to complete the game or not. If you
don't want to follow the main quest, you can wander off and explore the
world, talking to the people you find, helping them in whatever way you
can (or killing and robbing them, if you want), maybe get a job
somewhere, maybe go and see the friends you made in the previous game
and find out how they've gotten on since then - whatever. They are the
closest to simulating an RPG on a computer that anyone has come.

: (In other games I find approaching things in character mode

: is actually punished -- 'The Assyrians offered me a treaty
: when everyone else declared war on me, giving me one
: secure border and allowing me to concentrate my forces on
: defending my other borders. I am grateful for this and will
: respect their territory and will come to their aid when they
: are attacked.' In my experience, the computer AI -- or
: whatever -- acting as GM doesn't seem to be able to grasp
: this kind of motivation, since it won't let me 'win' the
: game until I conquer the Assyrians. Phooey!)

Is this Civilisation we're talking about? That's another game I
consider possible to play in character mode. Yes, exterminating
everyone else is an automatic win, but you don't have to; the real
aim is just to have the most points at the end. If it's another
game, then ignore what I just said.

--
Robin Adams robin...@sjc.ox.ac.uk
"Please do not offer my god a peanut."
-- Apu, the Simpsons

[Michele Ellington]

Triad3204 (tria...@aol.com) wrote:

I don't agree with your breakout here...

> Dramatists are
> interested in drama, drama is motivated by character -- hence the need for deep
> characters.

Much drama can be played out by shallow characters. Like a bad
romance or detective novel, you can have a lot of sturm and drang
without any real depth to the people involved.

> Simulationists attempt to simulate reality, reality has realistic
> people in it -- hence the need for realistic characters.

That depends on whether the realists are focused on the characters
or the story. All those reality based cop shows, for example, have
complete stories beginning to end, and we know nothing about the
people involved. Reality can be simulated by skimming along the surface
of personality and focusing on plot as well.

> Gamists are interested
> in the game, the game requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
> does not require a personality.

I don't think any of the three styles autimatically require a personality.
However, I think if a game is to be called "role-playing" there must
be a role played. The question is, to what extent must that role be
developed intoa full blown person tomeet the basic definition?

[Psychohist]

Justin Bacon posts, in part:

But -- putting that aside -- I also think you're wrong.

Dramatists are interested in drama, drama is motivated by
character -- hence the need for deep characters.

Simulationists attempt to simulate reality, reality has
realistic people in it -- hence the need for realistic

characters. Gamists are interested in the game, the game

requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
does not require a personality.

There are plenty of simulations that have nothing to do with people - even
worlds don't have to have people in them. There are also simulations that do
deal with people, but treat them in an aggregated way that doesn't require
characters.

Even from the standpoint of drama, I'd say that characters are not necessarily
optional - there was a period when laser light shows were popular, and people
went to see them for much the same reasons they'd go to see a stage play.

However, since there is no such thing as a "pure"
dramatist, a "pure" simulationist, or a "pure" gamist,
there are many people who can safely be described as
"gamists" who also play deep and/or realistic characters
because they have elements of the dramatist of
simulationist stance in them.

Alternatively, there may be reasons for being interested in characters that are
related to neither simulation nor drama.

Warren J. Dew

[Neelakantan Krishnaswami]

In article <b.evill-0805...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>, b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:
>
>I ask 'if the gamists appreciate what they say they appreciate, how come
>they are playing RPGs and not wargames' (and it's a genuine enquiry, not a
>jibe). You answer 'wargames are not RPGs'. It isn't a useful contribution
>to the debate.

I thought about it some, and came up with a possible answer: roleplaying
games allow a game player to bring his social intelligence to bear on a
problem in a way that he or she cannot in a purely abstract game.

Consider the following example: We have a set of cards with letters on one
side and numbers on the other. A card is said to be conforming if an odd
number has either a consonant or a vowel on the other side, or if it has an
even number on one side and a vowel on the other. A set of cards is placed
before you, and you can see the following letters and numbers on the face
visible to you: 7, F, 4. Which card(s) need to be turned over to determine if
they are conforming or not?

Now consider another problem: You are at a party where beer and Coke are
served, and there are people both over and under the age of 21. Someone
over the age of 21 can drink either Coke or beer legally, and someone under
21 may only drink Coke legally. You see three people talking, but the room
is smoggy and you can make the following details about each person. Person
A is drinking a Coke. Person B is old. Person C is drinking a beer. Which of
these people needs to be checked to make sure they have a legal drink?

These two problems are logically identical, but most people have a much easier
time solving the second on than the first. I've heard speculations that people
are evolved to handle social questions more quickly and easily than purely
abstract ones, but I don't know -- all I know is that this is an observable,
easily testable fact. (I could dig up references to a very similar experiment,
given a week or two.)

Neel

[John Kim]

This is comments with regard to the triangle model of
"Gamist," "Simulationist," and "Dramatist." I'm replying to Red
regarding his analysis of his style, and questions about the Gamist
style and the purpose of characters in it.

The Gamist style, as I see it, is about challenges to the
players. However, the point of doing this in a *role-playing game*
is the sense of reality which both expands and limits the solutions.
For example, in a tactical situation, you can find a creative new
tactic which would not be covered by normal wargame rules -- the GM
will evaluate it. The flip side is that PC actions must make sense
within that reality. These are the limits the players must work
with.

The level of role-playing required depends on the campaign,
of course. At the basest level, this is just things like players not
being allowed to use knowledge the PC doesn't have (i.e. gunpowder in
a medieval campaign, inexplicably knowing what another PC is doing
because you can hear the player). Some games, though, hold players
to stricter limits of behavior -- i.e. they must act within their
personalities (whether defined at start or in play).

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Red <red_arm...@hotmail.com> writes:
>I find, as I read this discussion, that I am having trouble identifying

>the distinction between "dramatist" and "simulationist" play styles.
>Now, when I run a game, I do so from a narrative outlook - I go out amnd
>set up pins for the PC's to knock down. However, I have a simulationist
>world view, so that the pins I set up do not have scripted bahaviour;
>they act as individuals in the world at large.

NPC's acting as individuals in the world at large is not
exclusively simulationist. It is a technique which can be used by
all of the three extremist styles. The distinguishing feature is
how they act or change with respect to the PC's.

In an ideal Gamist scenario, the GM sets up a problem to
challenge the players. She designs the NPC's so that they are
motivated opponents. But now she plays them as individuals: i.e. they
respond to PC actions realistically; they don't have access to GM-only
knowledge (that would be unfair). Presuming she's set it up well,
they shouldn't have to act unrealistically to challenge the players.

What makes this Gamist is (1) the GM designs the situation to
challenge the _players_. A counter-example might a problem is when a
PC must choose between revenge on his enemy and saving his loved one.
This is a dramatic challenge for the PC, but not a challenge for the
player. Another Gamist feature would be (2) the GM will block PC
attempts to sidestep the challenge. A typical example would be if the
players go and have the authorities deal with the problem.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>The reason for this confusion is that I see a distinction between the

>world, as a discrete entity largely objective for all game characters,
>and the narrative, which is the action "on the screen" and which I
>consciously tune in order to achieve a narrative result. This is
>also a feature of our contract, in that I expect my players to treat
>the game world as objective, and that is how I implement it for NPC's
>etc; but I feel free to select the most interesting of several
>possible outcomes.

Offhand, this seems to tend towards Dramatist, but not the
extreme of 100% Dramatist. A key question: let's say you've set
up the pins for a scenario, defining the key background. However,
early on the players completely misread a clue and before you think
of what to do -- they say they're going to another city to follow
up a red herring. The play session ends.

Now, according to what you've written up in the background,
they have been severely delayed and you feel that the results would
be less interesting. Are you willing to go back and rewrite some
of what you defined?

[Brett Evill]

In article <6it50h$8...@rgfn3.epcc.edu>, ad...@rgfn.epcc.edu (Michele
Ellington) wrote:

>Triad3204 (tria...@aol.com) wrote:

>> Gamists are interested
>> in the game, the game requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
>> does not require a personality.
>

>I don't think any of the three styles autimatically require a personality.
>However, I think if a game is to be called "role-playing" there must
>be a role played. The question is, to what extent must that role be
>developed intoa full blown person t omeet the basic definition?

You are begging the question. You just assume that these players are giong
to play RPGs because its RPGs that we are talking about. Why don't they
play wargames or backgammon instead? They most certainly could. Then they
wouldn't be playing the games that we are talking about, but so what?

Either something about characters, settings, and continuity appeals to the
gamist aesthetic, or gamist roleplayers appreciate simulation and drama
more than we give them credit for. It is not clear which. And supposing
that gamists roleplayers eschew Go and parcheesi just so that their games
can be *called* RPGs is not the answer.

[Keran]

The things you're describing both are audience stance. They're not
what I was speaking of with respect to mysteries.

I meant to call attention to the fact that there is, in the classic
mystery--as opposed to other forms of suspense novel which may
deal with similar sorts of events--a set of rules that are not
primarily dramatic in intent. They're intended to make the mystery
a *fair* challenge to the reader who's going to read it in
puzzle-solving mode, to see if they can discover the solution
before it's revealed. All the clues that makes it possible to solve
the puzzle must be presented to the reader before the denouement;
it's up to the reader to put them together correctly. This means that
dramatic techniques such as concealing some otherwise-undiscoverable
fact for surprise value is eschewed, for instance--generally, for
dramatic purposes, an undiscoverable essential fact concealed should
be foreshadowed in some fashion so that it doesn't appear to arrive
from nowhere, but it need not be revealed.

Larry Niven wrote an interesting essay on this subject--I believe
it's his introduction to _The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton_--in which
he discussed the difficulty of combining mystery with science
fiction, because if the solution to the mystery is going to
depend on alternative science, technology, lifestyles, etc., the
reader must be apprised of how it works before the denouement,
without giving away exactly what those workings will turn out to
mean. The same difficulty may exist in fantasy.

This really isn't important, except to point out that this OOC
problem-solving stance can occur with respect to one sort of
narrative, although it's far more common with respect to games.
I'd also suspect that there may be readers who approach hard
science fiction stories with technical puzzles in them in this
same puzzle-solving stance. It probably often occurs mixed
with audience stance; but it is not, to my mind, the same
kind of relationship to the narrative.

>However, that said, I think that Keran has identified a different stance.
>Rather than reading mystery stories, I would liken the stance to that
>adopted when one is playing a computer (so-called) role-playing game.
>
>I remember being introduced to such a game called (I think) 'Alone in the
>Dark' which involved controlling the actions of a character who starts off
>in the attic of a haunted house and who has to make her way to the
>basement while avoiding various beasties and disasters and uncovering
>assorted clues along the way. As I discovered, the first thing to do on
>gaining control of the character (who I'm sure had a name, but I can't
>remember it) was to slide a large trunk over the top of a trapdoor in the
>floor of the attic and then to push a wardrobe in front of the attic
>window. If one didn't do these things, a monster would come up through the
>trapdoor and kill the character or a different monster would come in
>through the window and kill the character. One would learn to avoid such
>things through trial-and-error. That is, the character would be killed and
>you would go back to the beginning of the game (or back to the last time
>you had saved it) and proceed forward again, trying different things to
>try and avoid whatever it was that killed the character last time.
>
>The stance adopted by the player of such a game is clearly not Author (the
>player has only the most limited control over the narrative), not Audience
>(the player has to actively cause events in the narrative for it to
>proceed, they can not just watch the story unfold) and not Actor or
>Character (the character in the narrative keeps dying).

Yes, that's how I see it.

> This last aspect
>can not be overstated. The PLAYER learns through trial-and-error, the
>CHARACTER keeps dying. Even once the player has learnt to push the trunk
>over the trapdoor in the attic, etc., there is *no way* that the character
>could have known that. The player only knows it because they had lost
>previous characters to that trap. It's a classic case of players using
>Out-of-Character knowledge to determine In-Character actions -- which is
>generally regarded as bad roleplaying in table top games, but is the
>central feature of computer role-playing games.
>
>In such games, the Character is literally only an elaborate playing piece,
>pushed around on the playing board by the player to achieve only the
>player's goals (solving the puzzle, getting the high score, etc.), not the
>character's goals. In fact, the character is not even assumed to have
>goals.
>
>This, I think, is a lot closer to what Keran is talking about.

This is probably its most characteristic and obvious manifestation.

<snip>

>Brett Evill <b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>>Excellent point. Would you care to name this stance?
>
>Given the above, may I suggest CRPG Stance? I have no idea how to
>pronounce this -- except, possibly, through some variation of 'Creep.'

I was going to suggest the 'gameplayer's stance,' myself. I associate
it most strongly with OOC puzzle-solving, but I don't think 'puzzle-
solver's stance' would cover all of its manifestations.

Keran
kera...@mail1.nai.net
http://nw3.nai.net/~keranset/
keranset.telmaron.com 5252

[Keran]

On Thu, 07 May 1998 09:22:00 -0600, zbe...@hempseed.com wrote:

>Warren Dew (psych...@aol.com (Psychohist)) wrote:
>
>>I can, however, propose an activity that is an almost pure embodiment of the
>>'problem solving' stance that Keran is proposing: solving a crossword puzzle.
>>
>>A crossword puzzle has a defined 'correct' answer, so there's no scope for
>>authorial activity. There's no character, so one can't solve it from the
>>character stance, or even portray it from the actor stance.
>

>Actually Crossword puzzles occurred to me as an example,
>as did Jigsaw puzzles, Mazes and a few other activities.
>This may have been what Keran meant, but I don't think
>they work as exemplars for what I was talking about for
>the very reason you identify: there is only _one_ 'correct'
>answer. This is rarely the case in RPGs.
>

>Whether a player's goals are to gather enough xp's this
>session to advance to the next level, have the strongest/
>toughest character in the party or finally capture the
>recurring villain this session, there are usually multiple
>ways of achieving the goal. There is no *one* answer;
>often there is not even a *single* optimal answer. Games
>and GMs who give a player only one possible path towards
>an answer are generally condemned for 'railroading' the
>player.

Actually, I've seen a fixed-solution game appreciated by its
players. One of the players explained that he was entertained
by trying to find the 'school solution' to the problem presented.

<snip>

>>I'm still not sure whether this is a separate stance, or just an active extreme
>>of the audience stance. I wish Sarah were around to provide her comments.
>
>I think it's a separate stance. Playing a wargame or poker
>or even solving a crossword puzzle, jigsaw puzzle or maze
>is a very different experience to watching a play, a film or a
>television program, reading a book or even listening to a
>record.

I also find it so.

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0805...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>Then I appears that I have not made myself clear. My point is not a
>trivial error in a syllogism.
>
>Let me try again. A model of RPGs that makes them fundamentally a form of
>simulation of worlds and people obviously implies that they must contain
>characters. A model of RPGs that makes them a form of collaborative
>narrative obviously implies the existence of characters. But there are
>lots of other forms of competitive game that get along fine without
>characters. So a model of RPGs that makes them a form of competition does
>not obviously imply that they should contain characters. But gamist RPGs
>do contain characters. So do the characters deliver something that
>contributes to the gamist aesthetic? If so, what? Or is it just that even
>roleplayers with strong gamist leanings appreciate a dash of dramatism and
>simulationism for synergic effects in their games?

Thank you. This does clarify your point.

>
>> Look at it from another corner: If you think
>>that RPG's are best considered as a narrative or dramatic pasttime, does
this
>>mean that you believe *all* narrative and dramatic pasttimes are RPGs? Does
>>going out and watching a movie belong in the threefold?
>
>Certainly not. I cannot understand how you got to this patently absurd
>proposition.
>
>I accused certain other people of arguing (1) All games are contests (2)
>RPGs are games, therefore (3) RPGs are contests. This argument is
>logically sound: it just happens that I don't accept its conclusion
>because I disagree with its major premise. You write as though I had
>argued (1) all RPGs are narrative, therefore (2) all narratives are RPGs.
>And I cannot see where I wrote anything of the sort.

You appeared to be arguing (1) Gamists view RPGs as contests (2) Contests do
not require characters, therefore (3) Gamists do not require characters to
play RPGs. WRT (2) you seemed to be arguing that if *some* contests don't
require characters then *no* contests require characters. I was trying to
ridicule this. Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask
rhetorically "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the persona
of a character? After all, movies are narratives, and one doesn't have to
assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."

But to try to answer you question: "So do the characters deliver something
that contributes to the gamist aesthetic? If so, what?" In the gamist
aesthetic, roleplaying games require characters not because roleplaying games
are *games* but because they are *roleplaying*. Without characters, a gamist
game would no longer be a roleplaying game, but rather some other kind of
game. A roleplaying game needs characters in much the same way a card game
needs cards: Not because "games need cards" or "games need characters" but
because of the *kind* of game being played. From the gamist aesthetic,
playing rpgs without characters is... not cheating so much as an exercise in
absuridity, rather like trying to play poker using chess pieces instead of
cards.

[Keran]

On 07 May 1998 16:39:24 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>Zoran Bekric posts, in part:

>Regarding the active not-quite-audience stance:
>

> Actually Crossword puzzles occurred to me as an example,
> as did Jigsaw puzzles, Mazes and a few other activities.
> This may have been what Keran meant, but I don't think
> they work as exemplars for what I was talking about for
> the very reason you identify: there is only _one_ 'correct'
> answer. This is rarely the case in RPGs.
>

>I think we're getting back to the stance versus style issue here. I think the
>general approach that you are describe in the rest of your post is more a
>description of the game oriented style than a description of separate stance.
>
>Remember that a player is thought not to use any one stance all the time.
>Rather, the model is that the player switches back and forth between actor,
>audience, author, and character stances, and perhaps this one we're talking
>about.
>
>If there's a stance here, I think it does involve looking at problems as having
>a 'right' answer. One might only get close - it's tough to be sure one has
>perfectly optimized one's point usage in Champions, say - but the player is
>trying to get as close as possible.
>
>As a basis for discussion, I'd suggest calling this 'analyst stance'.
>Comments, anyone?

I wouldn't call it by that name. Analysis can be done in-character
or out-of-character; calling it 'analyst' stance seems likely to
occasion enormous confusion. Aside from that, properly speaking,
some of its manifestations do not involve analysis but synthesis.
I'd prefer to call it gameplayer's stance.

If you mean that the player in this stance focuses on the problem's
having a *single* right answer, I'm not sure that's an required part
of the outlook. But it does seem to me that the player in this stance
necessarily conceives of the situation as having winning and losing
conditions. This element seems to me to be foreign to the other four
stances and an integral part of this one.

[Brett Evill]

In article <6iti3n$l7b$1...@strato.ultra.net>, ne...@alum.mit.edu
(Neelakantan Krishnaswami) wrote:

>In article <b.evill-0805...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:
>>

>>I ask 'if the gamists appreciate what they say they appreciate, how come
>>they are playing RPGs and not wargames' (and it's a genuine enquiry, not a
>>jibe). You answer 'wargames are not RPGs'. It isn't a useful contribution
>>to the debate.
>
>I thought about it some, and came up with a possible answer: roleplaying
>games allow a game player to bring his social intelligence to bear on a
>problem in a way that he or she cannot in a purely abstract game.

Interesting suggestion. It leaves gamist games requiring a degree of
accurate simulation as dramatist games do, but I think it is clearly
distinct from the simulationist ideal.

This deserves thought.

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <b.evill-0805...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:

>In article <6isaqs$1...@sjx-ixn1.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
><er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>>And in a roleplaying game, the problems exist in a gameworld and the means
of
>>solving those problems are characters within that gameworld. Something that
>>lacks a gameworld and characters may be a game, but it isn't a roleplaying
>>game. There are non-roleplaying games that don't fit into the threefold,
just
>>like there is non-roleplaying simulation that doesn't fit into the
threefold
>>and non-roleplaying drama that doesn't fit into the threefold.
>
>Yes, everyone recognises that. What we are discussing is *why* it is true.
>Why do roleplayers with strong gamist inclinations embed their puzzles in
>a gameworld? Does it contribute to the essentially gamist enjoyment in
>some way, and if so, how? Or is it that even the most gamist of
>roleplayers partake in part of the dramatist and simulationist aesthetics?
>
>Given that there are non-roleplaying games out there that seem to cater
>perfectly to the gamist aesthetic, why are supposed extreme gamists like
>Sandy Petersen still playing roleplaying games?

OK, 'Why do gamists play RPGs at all?' is a subtly different question from
'Why to gamist RPGers use characters?' and I appologize that it took so long
for the difference to penetrate my skull.

>
>It simply isn't adequate to say "if they dropped the characters and
>settings it wouldn't be RP any more"- because there is nothing forcing
>these people to play RP games rather than some other sort.
>

>I ask 'if the gamists appreciate what they say they appreciate, how come
>they are playing RPGs and not wargames' (and it's a genuine enquiry, not a
>jibe). You answer 'wargames are not RPGs'. It isn't a useful contribution
>to the debate.

I don't have a good answer to that. A short, but not useful answer would be
"Why not?" Role-playing games can be just as good, qua games, as wargames or
other kinds of games, so why shouldn't gamists play chess, wargames, *and*
RPGs just like dramatists read books, watch movies *and* play RPGs.

I could say that RPGs offer a different kind of challenge from non
roleplaying games, but this isn't helpful either. If I understand you
correctly, you want to understand *how* RPGs are different for gamists, and I
don't have a good answer to that.

One idea I'd like to float is that extreme gamists don't see their position
as being much different from the simulationists. Gamists see a lot of gamist
elements in Real Life(tm), and so expect game-worlds to also have gamist
elements out of pure versimilitude. Also, since gamist tend to be gamist wrt
real life, they tend to produce player-characters who are gamist wrt the game
world. The idea that their problem-solving is an OOC activity is puzzling to
gamists - their characters will also want to solve those problems and
overcome those challenges because the *characters* are gamists too!

[Brett Evill]

In article <6itk9b$6...@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>In article <b.evill-0805...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,

> b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) wrote:
>
>>Then I appears that I have not made myself clear. My point is not a
>>trivial error in a syllogism.
>>
>>Let me try again. A model of RPGs that makes them fundamentally a form of
>>simulation of worlds and people obviously implies that they must contain
>>characters. A model of RPGs that makes them a form of collaborative
>>narrative obviously implies the existence of characters. But there are
>>lots of other forms of competitive game that get along fine without
>>characters. So a model of RPGs that makes them a form of competition does
>>not obviously imply that they should contain characters. But gamist RPGs
>>do contain characters. So do the characters deliver something that
>>contributes to the gamist aesthetic? If so, what? Or is it just that even
>>roleplayers with strong gamist leanings appreciate a dash of dramatism and
>>simulationism for synergic effects in their games?
>

>Thank you. This does clarify your point.

Good. Sorry about the previous lack of clarity.

>>I accused certain other people of arguing (1) All games are contests (2)
>>RPGs are games, therefore (3) RPGs are contests. This argument is
>>logically sound: it just happens that I don't accept its conclusion
>>because I disagree with its major premise. You write as though I had
>>argued (1) all RPGs are narrative, therefore (2) all narratives are RPGs.
>>And I cannot see where I wrote anything of the sort.
>

>You appeared to be arguing (1) Gamists view RPGs as contests (2) Contests do
>not require characters, therefore (3) Gamists do not require characters to
>play RPGs. WRT (2) you seemed to be arguing that if *some* contests don't
>require characters then *no* contests require characters. I was trying to
>ridicule this. Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask
>rhetorically "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the persona
>of a character? After all, movies are narratives, and one doesn't have to
>assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."

Actually, that *is* a worthwhile question. One way to answer it is
"Because RPGs allow the players to adopt Character, Actor, and Author
stances toward the narrative, instead of just Audience". Another (perhaps
equivalent) is "Unlike [most] other narrative forms, RP is participative,
collaborative, and extemporary. It allows players to have the feeling of
taking part in the storytelling, it promotes intense interpersonal
interactions, it provides an opportunity for the enjoyable exercise of
ingenuity and other faculties, and it allows a powerful dramatic
experience by promoting very strong identification of the participants
with characters within the narrative". Yet another is "The difference
between RPGs and watching a movie is like the difference between playing
football and watching a game". (But I recognise that there are serious
problems with drawing the analogy in the last case too closely.)

>But to try to answer you question: "So do the characters deliver something
>that contributes to the gamist aesthetic? If so, what?" In the gamist
>aesthetic, roleplaying games require characters not because roleplaying games
>are *games* but because they are *roleplaying*. Without characters, a gamist
>game would no longer be a roleplaying game, but rather some other kind of
>game. A roleplaying game needs characters in much the same way a card game
>needs cards: Not because "games need cards" or "games need characters" but
>because of the *kind* of game being played. From the gamist aesthetic,
>playing rpgs without characters is... not cheating so much as an exercise in
>absuridity, rather like trying to play poker using chess pieces instead of
>cards.

Yes, but you are begging the question "Why do gamists play RPGs rather
than card games?".

I can see how cards contribute to the gamist aesthetic in card games. As
Greg Costikyan says in 'I Have No Words and I Must Design', games (in the
mathematic sense that he worships and I find irrelevant, perhaps because I
am very much a dramatist and *hate* competition) consist of contests in
which the participants make consequential decisions to affect the outcome.
The cards act as counters or tokens indicating options available to the
players. They are token resources that must be allocated among rival uses.

Why *do* gamists play RPGs? Given how complex they are, and how artificial
the competition, relying, as it does, on the GM to exercise peculiar and
colossal restrain, to provide a fair challenge rather than just use the
resources at his or her command as a contestant ought. RPGs must give
something to compensate for their complexity and the ambiguity of the GM's
part. Otherwise gamists would not play RPGs, which they do.

Could it be a valuable controlling metaphor, which makes it possible to
keep track of an uniquely complex form of game?

Could it be that RPGs offer a challenge to social intuition, a
problem-solving skill that few other games challenge?

I am afraid that the answer "so that they can play role-playing games" is
not good enough.

We may not discover the truth. But at least we should disabuse ourselves
of the belief that our opinions are knowledge.

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Warren, and others in the conversation--

First, sorry to drop out like that. I've received some rather
unpleasant and sad news, and it required my attention.

Warren asked some rather pointed and useful questions in an earlier post
in response to my first attempt to frame this issue.

Let me try again, by way of an example.

In a recent pbem game run by Mark Wallace, I'm playing a character named
CJ. The genre is modern-horror/X-files/Supernatural. CJ is a rather
deranged fellow--he was a US Marines/Special forces sniper and FO. He
and his partner, Roger, served as a deep penetration team during the
gulf war, spotting for the US naval bombardment squadron and for
air-strikes, and otherwise wreaking havoc where possible.

Roger died, and CJ knows it was his fault. But he doesn't remember much
of it. He suffers from blackouts and flash-backs. After the war he was
recruited by a rather shady "men-in-black" style government operation,
for whom he performed various kinds of ugly, and largely forgotten,
jobs. CJ doesn't remember much of this part of his life either--some
sort of drug therapy has left it all sort of vague. He knows he killed
people, and he knows he blew things up.

CJ entered the game as a recruit for the obscure Organization that backs
the PCs. He remembers being released from a mental facility, being
given money and a plane ticket, and being told to
meet with the PC group leader at a certain hotel in DC.

Who employs the PCs? CJ doesn't know. Is the Organization the same as
the Men-in-Black for whom he used to work? He doesn't know. When CJ
tried to return to the mental hospital from
which he was released, it wasn't there, just an abandoned ware-house--it
had never been a mental hospital, people said. A figment of his
imagination?

CJ is not very stable. At this point he doesn't care a whole lot about
his life--he's rather fatalistic, and not the least bit risk-averse.
The other PC's know he's something of a time-bomb,
albeit with a *very* useful set of skills. So they ride herd on him to
try to keep him in line--one of the other PC's is in love with him, and
wants to redeem him.

Plot-lines: What's lurking in his past? What happened to Roger? Will
CJ die stupidly and tragically (not at all unlikely)? Will he recover
his lost idealism? Will he figure out what's been
done to him and take revenge on the people who have used him?

Now--suppose this was your character (yeah--its a bit cliched, I'll
grant you--but it fits the genre well, and besides, the characters a
blast to play :)

How would you want the GM to handle things? For example, Kevin doesn't
know what happened to Roger, although Mark does. Kevin doesn't know
what happened to CJ after the gulf-war--Kevin doesn't know who the
Men-in-Black were, or even if they ever existed.

Since I (Kevin) don't know these things, I can't decide when it is
appropriate, authorially speaking, for CJ to have a flash-back, or for
CJ to black out. I need Mark to say--"CJ is having a flashback--fire,
everywhere, fear, anger, sadness. Play it appropriately!"

So for this particular character, anyway, I need to cede part of the
"internal" side of the character to the GM.

It does not have to be this way, of course. If I (Kevin) were privy to
some of the mysteries of the game, then I could *author* these internal
feelings for myself. So in a different kind of game, I would not need
Mark to provide those boundaries for me.

Does this make sense?

*****

Now, CJ is a rather extreme kind of character. His psychosis is very
sharply drawn. In this kind of extreme situation, where mental illness
(if that is what it is) limits a character's emotional autonomy, then
perhaps a division of labor between GM and player in which the GM takes
some authority for the authoring the internal world of a character is
appropriate.

What about less extreme characters? How do we know when it is
inappropriate for the GM to intrude?

Its that question that the whole business of the yahoo in the car was
aimed at. I've found, for me, that some sort of "push back" from the
world is sometimes necessary for me to be immersive. Sometimes it is
useful, for me, for the GM to say "CJ is feeling really angry because
that yahoo cut him off!" because that is not the kind of conclusion I
can reach on my own, based on my in-character perspective.

Best,
Kevin

[Psychohist]

Keran posts, in part:

I wouldn't call it by that name. Analysis can be done
in-character or out-of-character; calling it 'analyst'
stance seems likely to occasion enormous confusion. Aside
from that, properly speaking, some of its manifestations
do not involve analysis but synthesis. I'd prefer to call
it gameplayer's stance.

I'd find that even more confusing, as any player of a roleplaying game is
playing the game - a game player.

If you mean that the player in this stance focuses on
the problem's having a *single* right answer, I'm not
sure that's an required part of the outlook. But it
does seem to me that the player in this stance
necessarily conceives of the situation as having
winning and losing conditions. This element seems to
me to be foreign to the other four stances and an
integral part of this one.

Well, not necessarily a single right answer, but at least the best answer they
can get.

I'm not sure I agree with the win condition requirement. If I'm tooling the
Champions character creation rules to get the most powerful possible character
within a given point allocation, and I blow it, I still have a character. I
don't think there's a clear line between winning and losing here. Yet, I do
think it's an example of this puzzle solving stance.

Warren

[Triad3204]

In article <b.evill-0705...@tynslip2.apana.org.au>,
b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au (Brett Evill) writes:

>Now there are some people out there, like Sandy Petersen, for instance,
>and Greg Costikyan, who believe that RPGs are best understood, designed
>etc. by considering them to be members of the same class with Monopoly
>etc. Some of these people (Sandy Petersen, for example) make vociferous

>attacks on people who, as I did, say that they think RPGs are best
>considered as a narrative or dramatic pastime.

Add Gary Gygax himself to this list -- who once attacked me for describing the
artistic potentials of RPGs because they're "just games". (Well, "attacked" may
be a bit harsh -- he and I just both have very... combative... approaches to
debate. <g>)

And I agree with you, these are the people who I think of as gamist -- the same
type of people who have no problem with the outlandish restrictions of AD&D
because it's "just a game".

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Red]

Brett Evill wrote:

> >Hmm, very interesting. Is there any formal structure for the
> >ENVIRONMENT in which nrratives take place, or is the exposition of a
> >location taken to be an event?
>
> Interesting question. But is description part of narrative at all? Don't
> you find that in some works description interferes with the flow of
> narrative?
>

Oh yes. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, while being an
interesting book, will explain the intricacies of stripping paint off
walls for 4 or 5 pages - THAT is excessive. RPG's are even more hostile
to big descriptions, because your environement is interactive and busy,
so description is usually cut down to a tacitly agreed level (I
suspect).

I think description is part of the narrative, becuase in a very real way
it plavces demands and limitations on the action. Isolation is a common
feature of narrative (?) and can be created either through ostracism or
being physcially remote. I was wondering if there is any alaysis of the
way environment interacts and influences the flow, in that I would
imagine isolation implemented by society and isolation implemented by
environemnt would produce a different "narrative dynamic", or perhaps
story arc?

[Magnus L. Hetland]

> Hmm, very interesting. Is there any formal structure for the
> ENVIRONMENT in which nrratives take place, or is the exposition of a
> location taken to be an event?

Well -- in the model I'm referring to, both Characters and Settings
are characterized as "Existents" as opposed to "Events". The division
between character and setting lies mainly in the importance for the
story. (I think this division might be a bit artificial, but... I
guess you can have a story without setting, but not without
characters... or...)

I guess (though that is not explicitly part of the model) that one
could describe the setting as a paradigm of traits just as one would a
character.

--

Magnus
Lie
Hetland http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~mlh

[Magnus L. Hetland]

Red <red_arm...@hotmail.com> writes:

> Brett Evill wrote:
>
> > >Hmm, very interesting. Is there any formal structure for the
> > >ENVIRONMENT in which nrratives take place, or is the exposition of a
> > >location taken to be an event?
> >

> > Interesting question. But is description part of narrative at all? Don't
> > you find that in some works description interferes with the flow of
> > narrative?

Even though a *story* is a paradigm of events, a *narrative* (or a
discourse - the telling of a story) is not. It is a syntagm of
*narrative statements*. They describe characters, setting and
events. Setting can have a tremendous impact on the mood, context,
plot, character development, thematics etc. of a story, and in that
way moves the *discourse* on (in the way that the audience can build
the narrative in their minds and answer questions they are interested
in.) Only if it is not *used* to do that and *at the same time* keep
the story moving forwards, does it interfere with the flow of
narrative.

But I'm rambling...

In narratology setting is not an event, but an existent. In some forms
of event calculus (as seen in predicate logics used in artificial
intelligence) all existents are seen to be events because they exist
only for a limited amount of time... So, according to them, I am an
event (which is, again, a *fluent* -- something which exists in a
subset if time-space). Strange thought.

> >
>
> Oh yes. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, while being an
> interesting book, will explain the intricacies of stripping paint off
> walls for 4 or 5 pages - THAT is excessive.

I think I would find that boring, yes...

> RPG's are even more hostile
> to big descriptions, because your environement is interactive and busy,
> so description is usually cut down to a tacitly agreed level (I
> suspect).
>

But building atmosphere may be quite effectively done with small but
consistent details about the setting (and repeated elements of the
setting...)

> I think description is part of the narrative, becuase in a very real way
> it plavces demands and limitations on the action. Isolation is a common
> feature of narrative (?) and can be created either through ostracism or
> being physcially remote. I was wondering if there is any alaysis of the
> way environment interacts and influences the flow, in that I would
> imagine isolation implemented by society and isolation implemented by
> environemnt would produce a different "narrative dynamic", or perhaps
> story arc?

Hm... Deep questions... ;)

You should check out the book "Setting : How to Create and Sustain a
Sharp Sence of Time and Place in Your Fiction" by Jack M. Bickham
(Writers Digest Books 1994). It har a lot of clever stuff about
setting and atmosphere and thematics etc. Quite possibly something
relevant to what you are "philosophizing" about.

You could take a look at
<URL:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898796350/002-2010569-4803049>
where Amazon books have a shord description of the book.

[Tengu]

Warren Dew wrote:

|If there's a stance here, I think it does involve looking at problems as
having
|a 'right' answer. One might only get close - it's tough to be sure one has
|perfectly optimized one's point usage in Champions, say - but the player is
|trying to get as close as possible.
|
|As a basis for discussion, I'd suggest calling this 'analyst stance'.
|Comments, anyone?

Allow me to delurk for a moment and be so vain as to think I have
something to contribute to this particular line of thought.

Analyst stance was the first term that occured to me when I first read the
question. However, Keran's subsequent objection to the term because analysis
can be performed both IC and OOC has led me to think about this some more.

Personally, I would call it the "parser" stance. To me, it is very
analogous to the process I use in translation, which activity also
illustrates nicely the difference between the active audience stance and
this proposed new stance. (Yes, I realise "parser" isn't normally applied to
people, but it doesn't seem to big a stretch.)

In translating a text, one first reads it as active audience to grasp its
meaning and get a good overall impression of the text. Next, one parses the
text, looking specifically at what is said, what is critical to the meaning
of the text, what is ambiguous, whether any ambiguity is intentional and
needs to be preserved, and a host of similar details. This process is, to me
at least, different from even the most active levels of the audience stance
because it involves decoding everything the text refers to, both implicitly
and explicity, whereas when I'm acting as an active audience, I usually
focus on certain specific points, rather that everything within the work and
metawork.

I don't think there must necessarily be only one "right" answer to the
problem for this stance to be involved, either. To continue the translation
analogy, give ten equally skilled translators the same text, and you'll get
eleven equally valid translation. There is, however, an optimum to strive
for in translation, in terms of preseving as much of the original's text
tone, content, meaning, etc. as possible.

Anyhow, I think I've rambled on long enough. Back to lurking for me.
Please return to your regularly scheduled discussions.

--
Tengu
A la fin de l'envoi, je touche -- Cyrano de Bergerac

[Psychohist]

Kevin Hardwick gives the example of CJ, a character who has lost the memory of
large portions of his life; the gamesmaster knows what happened to him during
those periods, and the player does not. I take it the characters for the
campaign were generated by the gamesmaster and given to the players; correct me
if I'm wrong.

My interpretation of the situation is that since the gamesmaster knows so much
more about the character, CJ is actually the gamesmaster's character, not the
player's - akin to the situation when a gamesmaster character is given to a
visiting player to play for a session. Yes, some aspects, perhaps most
aspects, of character play have been delegated to the player, but the
gamesmaster, as the owner of the character, has the final say.

Keeping in mind that we were talking about immersive play, I do not think it is
possible for the player to play such a character immersively and at the same
time remain within the 'correct' character conception, including the facts
known by the gamesmaster and not the player - presuming for the moment, as is
implied by your post, that those facts had a strong formative nature on the
personality of the character, which effects are again known to the gamesmaster
and not the character.

Note that the situation is different if the player knows the effects on the
character's personality better than the gamesmaster, which is possible even if
the gamesmaster knows the history better.

If the character were played immersively, I think that you'd end up with two
different characters - the player's version, and the gamesmaster's version. I
can't see this working well unless the gamesmaster is willing to adjust his
conception of the character, letting the player have the final say;
essentially, the character would then have been 'turned over' to the player.

I should note that I've seen a number of cases of characters being turned over
from one player or gamesmaster to another; in no cases were the before and
after personalities consistent.

What about less extreme characters? How do we
know when it is inappropriate for the GM to intrude?

If a player is playing a character immersively, prescriptive gamesmaster
intrusion is a recipe for disaster. In a situation where such intrusion may be
necessary - where character ownership is largely shared, for example, as in the
case of CJ - I think the actor and author stances, or a nonimmersive character
stance, are more appropriate.

I agree with Mary that gentle, nonprescriptive intrusion may be appropriate.
In the case of CJ, this might take the form of revealing some previously
forgotten memories at the appropriate point. In the case of Kevin and the
yahoo, this might take the form of reminding Kevin's player, 'don't forget that
incident yesterday'. (Though in the latter case, as gamesmaster, I'd assume
that if Kevin didn't overreact to the Yahoo, he just wasn't as upset over the
previous incident as I'd thought.)

Warren Dew

[Bruce Baugh]

In article <199805051414...@ladder03.news.aol.com>, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

> a) The GM is clearly given the task of creating a world.
> (Here a slight muddying occurs, because the GM is also
> expected to create characters as part of that world.)

Just to muddy things, many of my best games haven't worked this way.
The one I'm now developing doesn't - it uses a publicly available
background, plus material of my own, with substantial input from
prospective players. I'm more like lead wranger than primary
creator. I expect a similar fluidity to affect character creation.

Which makes me wonder about the extent to which PC/rest-of-universe
dichotomies are more products of assumptions imported from gaming's
early influences and simply not sufficiently examined, expect
perhaps in Jonathan Tweet games. :)

--
bruce...@mindspring.com
http://brucebaugh.home.mindspring.com/
Rolegaming, writing tools, miscellany

[Neelakantan Krishnaswami]

In article <6j306q$11s...@news.mindspring.com>, bruce...@mindspring.com (Bruce Baugh) wrote:
>
>Which makes me wonder about the extent to which PC/rest-of-universe
>dichotomies are more products of assumptions imported from gaming's
>early influences and simply not sufficiently examined, expect
>perhaps in Jonathan Tweet games. :)

An honest question, not meant to be snide: aside from Ars Magica[*], which
of Jonathan Tweet's games have any substantial departure from mainstream
gaming? I know you like both Everway and OtE, and since I don't, perhaps
you see some virtue in them that I have overlooked.

[*] For the pedants: more people than Tweet were involved, I know.

Neel

[Bruce Baugh]

In article <6j34ft$l8j$1...@strato.ultra.net>, ne...@alum.mit.edu (Neelakantan Krishnaswami) wrote:

>An honest question, not meant to be snide: aside from Ars Magica[*], which
>of Jonathan Tweet's games have any substantial departure from mainstream
>gaming? I know you like both Everway and OtE, and since I don't, perhaps
>you see some virtue in them that I have overlooked.

OTE redefined the basic concept of "attribute", with player-defined
categories to fill a number of slots rather than assigning ratings
to fixed categories. Everway opened up non-dice randomizing to a lot
of folks, like me, for who other takes didn't click, does classical
heroes better than anything else I know, and has proven quite good
at working for liberal-arts people of my acquaintance who don't
"get" other games.

There's more, but those are the key points.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

I played in an RPGA competition at Origins sometime in the early
nineties, on a lark. The game was scored on two criteria: "how
well you roleplayed" and "how well you contributed to accomplishing
the scenario goal". I believe the two were ranked equally. "How
well you roleplayed" was an evaluation of your skills as Actor:
you were presented with a pre-gen character with various quirks
and skills, and asked to make them as engaging as possible
without spotlight hogging. "How well you contributed to accomplishing
the goal" is this nebulous fifth stance we're talking about, I
think: at least, it doesn't feel like Author or Audience to
me, and is certainly not In-Character. My impression was that
you were supposed to work towards the goal both by metagame
(nudge the other players when time was short, etc.) and by
in-game (use your spells effectively) methods.

It was the purest Actor roleplaying I've ever done, and pretty
entertaining as such, though drastically unlike anything I'd
do in a long-term game. The player who won my section did
a mage with a distaste for dirt and a humorously neurotic
personality, and did it very well--balancing presenting the
character with keeping the game moving. (Part of your "how
well did you roleplay?" score was voted on by the other players,
a manuver probably designed to discourage hogging the spotlight.)

Around the same time, I read a series of pre- and post-tournament
evaluations for another RPGA tournament module. One major
point that came out of the postmortems is that ideal Actor-
mode characters are different from IC-mode characters: they
need, especially in the limited confines of a tournament session,
to provide plenty of opportunity to strut their stuff. They
should not be quiet, they should not have secrets; they need
to wear their personality on their sleeve. Players who were
pitched the "strong and silent" PC complained that they couldn't
possibly do well in the game, even though he was powerful in
combat. This is, I guess, Actor stance from a Gamist perspective.

The other note from the postmortems was that the scenario was
deliberately designed to be unfinishable (so as to get maximum
scope for differences in score among groups). No one liked
this. They wanted to solve the problem presented, and even
knowing that they'd scored well didn't make the players happy
about not finishing. This strikes me as tied into the nebulous
fifth stance again. Maybe I'd call it Tactical stance.

Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu

[Psychohist]

More thoughts on the 'fifth stance'. I'm still not sure it's separate from the
existing four; I thought it might be illuminating to try to look at this stance
from the standpoint of each of the three gaming styles.

From a story oriented point of view, I would think this stance would be invoked
when trying to figure out, as player or gamesmaster, how to develop the
existing narrative to fit the desired story form - for example, the traditional
introduction/buildup/climax format, if that's what I'm going for.

From a world oriented point of view, it could involve figuring out how the
details of the world fit together - if the city walls are stone, but there's no
quarry for five days' travel, what does that imply? I do this a lot as
gamesmaster, to find out more about my campaign world.

From a game oriented point of view, it involves analyzing information -
puzzles, or details about the game world - and using it to further the player's
goals.

But all of these seem to me to be a combination of audience (noticing details)
and author (using them to achieve a goal of the player or gamesmaster).

And now that I look back, Edward McWalters characterized 'gamist author stance'
as follows:

What can I do to change the situation and further my
set goals?

Given that "my" refers to the player here (he uses "my character's" when
referring to the character), I think this is a pretty accurate description of
what we've since been speculating on as the fifth stance.

I draw a tentative conclusion that there is no fifth stance, and that what
we're looking at is interaction between the audience and author stances,
especially from a game oriented point of view.

Counterexamples? Other comments?

Warren Dew

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Erol K Bayburt wrote:

> <rant> IMNSHO, if one cuts roleplaying off from it's gaming roots, the
> result is not a role-playing game as I understand the term. It is a
> role-playing something-else - something that is as different from a
> role-playing-game as a role-playing-game is from miniature wargaming.
> </rant>

The label "rpg" strikes me as pretty loose--its a big tent.

I started out playing D&D--and it was pretty much a minatures war-game
extended into fantasy, with a bare minimum of character or story thrown
in.

Over the years I moved closer to a purer narrative/dramatic/story-based
style of play.

More recently I've moved back to a diced, simulationist style of play.

For all the differences in what I've done over the years, I do see a
great deal of continuity in the activity. I may not be able to tell you
exactly why, but I can say with some certainty "this is part of the
family of role-playing-game, and this isn't." Once-upon-a-time for
example, seems to me to have crossed a boundary--its no longer
role-playing (although it is, arguably, a game). But Theatrix as David
Berkman described it still strikes me as role play.

Obviously, YMMV.

At some level, this kind of conversation strikes me as nominalist--its
all in the name.

Best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Erol K Bayburt wrote:

> Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask
> rhetorically "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the
> persona of a character? After all, movies are narratives, and one
> doesn't have to assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."

In some ways I think this is an interesting question.

In conventional drama, the story does in fact require encouraging
audience identification with character. So for conventional drama your
second sentence doesn't follow--in most movies, the audience *does*
assume the role of a character, via identification.

However, this is not true of all movies--some movies, especially highly
allegorical movies, do not depend on this identification. Its not clear
to me that they would of necessity be *dramatic* movies--I don't know.
John Kim, if you read this, maybe you can comment?

Could one have a drama that does not require identification with a
character, as Erol seems to suggest above?

If so, what would an rpg that tried to emulate the style of the movie
look like?

Best,
Kevin

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Psychohist wrote:

> I take it the characters for the campaign were generated by the
> gamesmaster and given to the players; correct me if I'm wrong.

No--CJ is my character, my creation. I simply indicated that there were
blank spots and left it to the GM to fill them in.

This is not all that new a thing, for us. For example, in a rune-quest
game some years ago one character turned out to be a long-lost Orlanthi
prince. The player had left the character's background "blank" and the
GM wrote the back story, and then during play the character discovered
some of it.

What has happened to CJ is like that, only considerably more extreme.

> My interpretation of the situation is that since the gamesmaster knows
> so much more about the character, CJ is actually the gamesmaster's
> character, not the player's - akin to the situation when a gamesmaster
> character is given to a visiting player to play for a session. Yes,
> some aspects, perhaps most aspects, of character play have been
> delegated to the player, but the
> gamesmaster, as the owner of the character, has the final say.

Hm. Maybe. It doesn't *feel* like that to me. CJ is my character--the
ethic in our group is that Mark (the GM) acts to support the character
and my characterization.

And of course there is a sense in which I'm the local expert on CJ--my
own sense of his character is much stronger than is Mark's. So if there
is a difference between us, Mark differs to me. What Mark does is to
supply the primal, raw emotions, in certain situations. I'm the one
who, "wearing" the character of CJ, has to figure out how to deal with
them. I don't think its accurate to say that CJ is Mark's character,
really--I don't think he has ever been immersive with CJ, for example,
while I have been so quite strongly.

Anyway, the places where Mark has input are pretty limited--he tells me
when I'm having a flashback or some other really powerful emotional
response that transcends CJ's rational will, and then I play it. But
the decisions are mine--Mark's input is the constraint necessary for me
to play the character as written.

I was thinking a bit of agent Molder (X-Files) when I wrote the
character. There are major things in Molder's past that are unknown to
him, and which sometimes evoke powerful emotional responses in him.

To play a character like that, I think, the GM *has* to provide some of
the internal life of the character.

> Keeping in mind that we were talking about immersive play, I do not
> think it is possible for the player to play such a character
> immersively and at the same time remain within the 'correct' character
> conception, including the facts known by the gamesmaster and not the
> player - presuming for the moment, as is
> implied by your post, that those facts had a strong formative nature

> on the personality of the character, which effects are again known to

> the gamesmaster and not the character.

Interesting. And yet its *this* character which has been the most
successful vehicle for immersive play, for me.

I think that the reason I can succeed so much more easily in being
immersive with this character is because the GM, by providing some of
the subconscious emotional input of my character, frees me up from
*having* to assume an authorial role. So I can just *be* the character.

Its been a really powerful experience, for me. When it has gone well,
I've been able to get inside the head of a character that is radically
different from myself.

My best,
Kevin

[Bruce Baugh]

In article <355721AD...@wt.infi.net>, krhr...@wt.infi.net wrote:

>I think that the reason I can succeed so much more easily in being
>immersive with this character is because the GM, by providing some of
>the subconscious emotional input of my character, frees me up from
>*having* to assume an authorial role. So I can just *be* the character.

Now that's interesting. I must mull this over.

Yeah, it occurs to me that one of the few occasions when I've gotten
particularly immersive, the characters have been "damaged goods" in
various ways, with some elements of incoming force left up to the
GM.

[Psychohist]

Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:

No--CJ is my character, my creation. I simply indicated
that there were blank spots and left it to the GM to fill
them in.

I guess I misinterpreted the situation. The rest of my comments don't apply to
the character, then.

Interesting. And yet its *this* character which has been
the most successful vehicle for immersive play, for me.

I think that the reason I can succeed so much more easily

in being immersive with this character is because the GM,
by providing some of the subconscious emotional input of
my character, frees me up from *having* to assume an
authorial role. So I can just *be* the character.

Interesting. Yet another take on how to start playing immersively.

Its been a really powerful experience, for me. When it
has gone well, I've been able to get inside the head of a
character that is radically different from myself.

It'll be even more powerful when you start getting the emotions immersively.
Keep us posted?

Warren Dew

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <35571DC6...@wt.infi.net>,

"Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>Erol K Bayburt wrote:
>
>> Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask
>> rhetorically "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the
>> persona of a character? After all, movies are narratives, and one
>> doesn't have to assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."
>
>In some ways I think this is an interesting question.
>
>In conventional drama, the story does in fact require encouraging
>audience identification with character. So for conventional drama your
>second sentence doesn't follow--in most movies, the audience *does*
>assume the role of a character, via identification.

Maybe it's just lack of sleep, but it seems to me that this is streching the
concept of 'assuming the role of a character' so far as to make it
meaningless.

Consider a situtation in an RPG where Ham of the Lettervilles is having an
intense discussion with his mother, the Queen. Ham is the PC of one of the
players, the Queen is an NPC being run by the GM, and the other players are
watching the discussion in Audience mode - their characters aren't there.

Would you consider it meaningful to say that *all* the players are assuming
the role of Ham? If not, how is the situtation where the players watch Ham in
a RPG different than one where they go and watch 'Ham of the Lettervilles' on
stage or on the silver screen?

[woodelf]

In article <35507D1B...@hotmail.com>, Red
<red_arm...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Psychohist wrote:
>
> > I seem to recall Sarah Kahn mentioning that she played in some games
that were
> > not particularly dramatic, but pretty clearly fell in the style that's now
> > called 'dramatist' - one of the reasons why I prefer the term 'story
oriented'.
> >
> > I think that in a very fundamental way, world oriented simulations cannot be
> > viewed as narratives - or to put it another way, viewing them as narratives
> > misses most of the simulation.
> >
>
> I find, as I read this discussion, that I am having trouble identifying
> the distinction between "dramatist" and "simulationist" play styles.
> Now, when I run a game, I do so from a narrative outlook - I go out amnd
> set up pins for the PC's to knock down. However, I have a simulationist
> world view, so that the pins I set up do not have scripted bahaviour;
> they act as individuals in the world at large. I then "run" these NPC's
> or whatever according to their goals within the initial world setting;
> the players do the same.
[snipped to appease teh newserver gods]

it sounds to me like you hvae the distinctions down cold. you're just
confused because, like most people, you fall in the gray area between the
extremes. you are more simulationist during world-building, and more
dramatist during GMing, and i'll bet that you aren't completely without
gamist concerns at either stage. similarly, i'm almost entirely
simulationist when doing the "static" elements of world-building, and
sorta split down the middle between simulation and drama when crafting
NPCs and story hooks, and when actually running.

woodelf <*>
nbar...@students.wisc.edu
http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~woodelf

"But this...this, this, *this* is like being *nibbled* to death
by...what are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long bill, webbed
feet...go quack..." "Cats." "Cats. I'm being nibbled to death by
cats." -- Londo and Vir

[Keran]

On Fri, 08 May 1998 10:48:39 -0400, "Kevin R. Hardwick"
<krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>Warren, and others in the conversation--
>
>First, sorry to drop out like that. I've received some rather
>unpleasant and sad news, and it required my attention.

<description of character snipped>

>What about less extreme characters? How do we know when it is
>inappropriate for the GM to intrude?
>

>Its that question that the whole business of the yahoo in the car was
>aimed at. I've found, for me, that some sort of "push back" from the
>world is sometimes necessary for me to be immersive. Sometimes it is
>useful, for me, for the GM to say "CJ is feeling really angry because
>that yahoo cut him off!" because that is not the kind of conclusion I
>can reach on my own, based on my in-character perspective.

I see. I wouldn't get immersion with this character at all.

I can handle characters who don't understand their own reactions
and are missing large chunks of their pasts. I can even handle
characters where I the player don't know what happened, either--
but neither does anyone else. The past can be developed in play,
as the character fleshes out: what sort of past could produce
this present? But my model of how the character is behaving
*now* must be definitive.

I can accept others' inputs to the character model: what's
happening in the environment for the character to react to? But
I cannot accept anyone else's determining the outputs. Either
the externally-imposed response is what my intuitive model would
have produced and is redundant, or it's what some *other* model
would have produced and is out of character with respect to my
model. Discontinuity like this will smash immersion reliably for
me; if I attempted to play under these strictures the character
would, very predictably, be cardboard.

In other words: if my model doesn't produce the result that
the character is really angry because someone cut him off,
then there is no way I'm going to experience it immersively.
Someone else cannot simply tell me that the character is
angry and expect to have it work. To produce anger they must
describe a situation which would yield that result with my
model. This is rather like that adage of fiction writing that
says, "Show; don't tell"--that is to say, merely saying that
the main character is in a situation that is "frightening" is
no substitute for describing a situation that produces fear.

I would never accept a division where the GM is responsible
for determining parts of the character's internal landscape.
For me, if the GM has the definitive character model, it's
his character, not mine; let him play it.

Yes, this restricts the kinds of characters and plot structures
I can achieve immersion with. I spent most of my playing time
in author or character stance and I do not regard these as
opposed to each other, but complementary; I need more
scope as author than you have in the example above to
reach immersion.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

In article <35571DC6...@wt.infi.net>,

Kevin R. Hardwick <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>Erol K Bayburt wrote:

>> Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask
>> rhetorically "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the
>> persona of a character? After all, movies are narratives, and one
>> doesn't have to assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."

>In conventional drama, the story does in fact require encouraging

>audience identification with character. So for conventional drama your
>second sentence doesn't follow--in most movies, the audience *does*
>assume the role of a character, via identification.

If I understand correctly what "identifying with a character
in a movie" means, it's very different for me from playing a
character in an RPG, especially Immersively: different not
just in quantity but in kind.

When I "identify" (it's not a word I like) with a character in
a movie, that means I cheer his successes and feel bad over his
failures. It doesn't mean I think his thoughts or feel his
feelings, however. I generally don't have enough information
to even begin to do that. At most, I may do a little planning
for him--"Hm, how is Luke going to get out of the garbage crusher?"
But there's not, as far as I can tell, any blending of him and
me beyond the fact that I care about his fate and take his
successes and failures to heart.

What I'm aiming for with an Immersive character is to think
the character's thoughts and feel his feelings, in so far as I
can. This does bring along with it cheering his successes and
feeling bad over his failures--if *he* does--but it's very different
in other regards. In a movie, if something good happens to the
character but he doesn't yet know or appreciate it, I'll feel
good on his behalf. With an Immersive character I won't--he's
ignorant or unappreciative, so until I leave IC stance so am
I. (I recall a player of mine looking up in mid-session from
a line of play which was clearly making him happy and engaged,
and saying suddenly and with distress "I'm going to get all of
the PCs killed, aren't I?" The idea that this was distressing
hadn't even occured to him, since it hadn't occured to the
character he was playing.)

I think you can only push the RPG-as-drama metaphor so far
before it disintegrates, and this is the breaking point as far
as I'm concerned. My relationship with Luke Skywalker is
just a different sort of animal from my relationship with my
PC Markus. Using "identification" for both muddies the
water something fierce.

A nice image of the distinction is that when I have dreams
about movie characters, the dream is *about* the character,
whereas when I have dreams about RPG characters the dream is
from the character's point of view. (The only other form
of narrative with which I have had this experience is text
adventures, and that only once.)

Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu

[John Kim]

A reply to Kevin Hardwick about various drama theory and the
extremes of the Dramatist style.

Kevin Hardwick <krhr...@wt.infi.net> writes:
>Erol K Bayburt wrote:
>> Maybe a better way to have put would have been to ask rhetorically
>> "Why does the dramatist aesthetic require assuming the persona of a
>> character? After all, movies are narratives, and one doesn't have
>> to assume the persona of a character to watch a movie."

[...]

>In conventional drama, the story does in fact require encouraging
>audience identification with character. So for conventional drama
>your second sentence doesn't follow--in most movies, the audience
>*does* assume the role of a character, via identification.

Well, but identification is not the same as role-playing. For
example, a player in an RPG may be out of the action and watch another
player and for a time identify with that *other* PC.

The important point here, though, is the we are talking about
the "Dramatist" style of role-playing. As I understand it, this is
playing with an eye towards the narrative to make it as dramatic
as possible. The rhetorical extreme of the Dramatist stance would
be where all the players collectively tell a story without the
unneccessary limits of traditional RPG's.

Taken to extremes, you might say that Gamist becomes
strategy games and puzzle solving. Dramatist becomes collective
storytelling (a la. the _Once Upon a Time_ card game or such).
Simulationist becomes collective world and history-building.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

>
>However, this is not true of all movies--some movies, especially
>highly allegorical movies, do not depend on this identification. Its
>not clear to me that they would of necessity be *dramatic* movies--I
>don't know. John Kim, if you read this, maybe you can comment?
>
>Could one have a drama that does not require identification with a
>character, as Erol seems to suggest above?
>
>If so, what would an rpg that tried to emulate the style of the movie
>look like?

Movies are very much a visual medium. The movies which don't
depend on character identification are usually akin to visual art.
I don't see that they can easily be emulated by gamers working in a
verbal or maybe pencil-and-paper medium. In any case, it sort of begs
the question of what makes it an RPG if the players are not playing
characters.

[Karen J. Cravens]

In article <35580ABF...@wt.infi.net>,

"Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>But seriously, isn't this how it works in a movie, for you? A good
>movie, at least for me, is one in which whatever the conflict is that
>drives the movie *matters* to me, because I've identified with the
>protagonist. Bad movies typically fail to convince me that the driving
>conflict matters--sometimes because I cannot suspend disbelief, and more
>often because I just don't identify with the main character.

"Identified with" isn't the same as "sympathized with," however,
and I think movies are generally the latter.

-- Karen Cravens | Phoenyx PBeM RPG Listserver: majo...@phoenyx.net
sil...@phoenyx.net | http://www.phoenyx.net/
An elephant is a mouse buit to mil-specs.

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Erol K Bayburt wrote:

> In article <35571DC6...@wt.infi.net>,

> "Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:
>

> Maybe it's just lack of sleep, but it seems to me that this is
> streching the concept of 'assuming the role of a character' so far as
> to make it meaningless.

Well, I'm certainly willing to entertain the notion that I'm wrong :)

But seriously, isn't this how it works in a movie, for you? A good
movie, at least for me, is one in which whatever the conflict is that
drives the movie *matters* to me, because I've identified with the
protagonist. Bad movies typically fail to convince me that the driving
conflict matters--sometimes because I cannot suspend disbelief, and more
often because I just don't identify with the main character.

Does drama work differently for you?

> Consider a situtation in an RPG where Ham of the Lettervilles is
> having an intense discussion with his mother, the Queen. Ham is the PC
> of one of the players, the Queen is an NPC being run by the GM, and
> the other players are watching the discussion in Audience mode - their
> characters aren't there.
>
> Would you consider it meaningful to say that *all* the players are
> assuming the role of Ham? If not, how is the situtation where the
> players watch Ham in a RPG different than one where they go and watch
> 'Ham of the Lettervilles' on stage or on the silver screen?

Well, it depends, I suppose. In some games I'd say that audience mode
participation *does* function as drama, or at least I could imagine such
a game. I've never played in an rpg like that.

In our games audience mode is rarely developed as drama--so the
identification with Ham isn't necessary in order to sustain interest in
the game. Usually, when we watch another player interact with the GM,
its from the stance of the character. I'm always asking myself "how
would my character react to that? and how do I portray my character's
reaction to the other players?"

So I guess what I'm saying is that we don't use audience stance all that
much in our games.

But if we were to choose to emphasize audience stance, and if our agenda
were dramatic (after all, not all movies are dramatic in nature) then
yes, I would say that the power and goodness of the drama would stem
from the audience identifying with Ham and with whatever was at stake in
his argument with his mom.

An interesting post--I've never followed this through before. Thanks .
. .

Best,
Kevin

[Brett Evill]

In article <35580ABF...@wt.infi.net>, krhr...@wt.infi.net wrote:

>Erol K Bayburt wrote:
>
>> In article <35571DC6...@wt.infi.net>,
>> "Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe it's just lack of sleep, but it seems to me that this is
>> streching the concept of 'assuming the role of a character' so far as
>> to make it meaningless.
>
>Well, I'm certainly willing to entertain the notion that I'm wrong :)
>
>But seriously, isn't this how it works in a movie, for you? A good
>movie, at least for me, is one in which whatever the conflict is that
>drives the movie *matters* to me, because I've identified with the
>protagonist. Bad movies typically fail to convince me that the driving
>conflict matters--sometimes because I cannot suspend disbelief, and more
>often because I just don't identify with the main character.

The thing that destroys identification for me, and spoils my enjoyment of
a movie, most is when the character does something that I consider utterly
stupid in context (except sometimes when the charcter is supposed to be
stupid). This includes stupidities of commission and stupidities of
omission.

--
Brett Evill

To reply, remove 'spamblocker.' from <b.e...@spamblocker.tyndale.apana.org.au>

[Keran]

On 10 May 1998 13:38:40 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:

>More thoughts on the 'fifth stance'. I'm still not sure it's separate from the
>existing four; I thought it might be illuminating to try to look at this stance
>from the standpoint of each of the three gaming styles.

I am not convinced that it is useful or correct to attempt to make the
narrative stances mean something different in different flavors of
games, in truth. It seems to me that there is fundamental confusion
induced by trying to munge the narrative stances together with
the threefold when they don't address the same question.

>From a story oriented point of view, I would think this stance would be invoked
>when trying to figure out, as player or gamesmaster, how to develop the
>existing narrative to fit the desired story form - for example, the traditional
>introduction/buildup/climax format, if that's what I'm going for.
>
>From a world oriented point of view, it could involve figuring out how the
>details of the world fit together - if the city walls are stone, but there's no
>quarry for five days' travel, what does that imply? I do this a lot as
>gamesmaster, to find out more about my campaign world.
>
>From a game oriented point of view, it involves analyzing information -
>puzzles, or details about the game world - and using it to further the player's
>goals.
>
>But all of these seem to me to be a combination of audience (noticing details)
>and author (using them to achieve a goal of the player or gamesmaster).

It seems to me that you've confused game play with game design, puzzle
solution with puzzle construction. I'm calling it gamePLAYER's stance
for a reason.

It's called a narrative *stance* for a reason, too. It's a description
of one's relationship to a work which has a narrative character, one's
position with respect to the content of the narrative. It is not a
description of what faculties one brings to bear to carry out the
function. Presumably, an actor might consider the question of how
best to portray a character with the same faculties he uses to solve
other problems; but that does not change the fact that his
relationship to the content of the narrative is that of an actor
portraying a character, not that of an author writing it. Neither is
he attempting to solve a problem posed within the narrative:
he is not a gameplayer.

An author attempting to work out a plotline still remains in an
authorial relationship to the work. A programmer constructing
a simulation, likewise. A designer laying out the puzzles to be
solved in a game, likewise. A gamemaster building a world likewise
has an authorial relationship to that world.

The relationship of anyone building a puzzle, a scenario, a plot, a
game, etc., to the work is authorial.

I think your definition of 'author' may be too broad. Is there
any stance which doesn't have any goals, and in which no
action whatsoever is taken to achieve them? Certainly the actor
has goals--to attempt to portray the character well--and makes
use of technique to achieve them. Even the audience--passive
as it is--has a goal: to be entertained by the narrative--and
takes action to achieve it: watching or listening.

>And now that I look back, Edward McWalters characterized 'gamist author stance'
>as follows:
>
> What can I do to change the situation and further my
> set goals?
>
>Given that "my" refers to the player here (he uses "my character's" when
>referring to the character), I think this is a pretty accurate description of
>what we've since been speculating on as the fifth stance.
>
>I draw a tentative conclusion that there is no fifth stance, and that what
>we're looking at is interaction between the audience and author stances,
>especially from a game oriented point of view.
>
>Counterexamples? Other comments?

I do not think that the player of a game is properly described
as having an authorial relationship to it. The designer is the
one who lays claim to that.

Who has an authorial relationship to The Colossal Cave? A
player, or Willie Crowther?

Who is the author of King's Quest? A player, or Roberta
Williams?

Who is the author of a crossword puzzle? The person who
designs the puzzle, or the one who fills it in?

Suppose that you have played "The Tomb of Horrors."
Would you describe yourself as an author of the module
for that reason, or is Gary Gygax the author?

Suppose that you read _The Nine Tailors_ primarily for
the fun of attempting to beat Lord Peter Wimsey to the
solution? Would you say that your relationship to the
work was authorial, or is that relationship more properly
attributed to Dorothy Sayers?

I am not willing to call anyone's relationship to a game
'authorial' when, if spoken in plain language, such a claim
would be patent nonsense, because I want to be understood
if at all possible. If this gameplayer's stance is not a
separate stance, the only thing it can possibly be, without
doing gross violence to language, is audience stance.

The reason I don't think it's audience stance is that I
don't think a gameplayer has the same relationship to
a game that a member of the audience has to a play,
usually. For instance, consider the case of people watching
someone else play a computer or arcade-style game--
Mario, perhaps, or Defender--for the entertainment value
of watching the play--not an unusual thing to do if you're
waiting for your turn as a player. I don't think that the
observers have assumed the same stance with respect to
the game that the player has, nor that the player has
assumed the same stance as the designer. I should have
said the observers had taken audience stance, the player
gameplayer's stance, and the designer author.

In an RPG, I think the person who posed a particular
problem--typically, the GM--has taken author stance with
respect to that problem; the player attempting to solve it
in an OOC stance is probably in gameplayer's stance; other
players observing would likely be in audience stance. Note
well that a player attempting to solve the same problem
from an IC viewpoint would be in character stance: it's the
perspective he assumes with respect to the narrative that's
telling for this classification, not what kind of mental
operation he's performing.

I have tentatively decided to call it gameplayer's stance
because it seems to me that that's the term least likely
to give the reader the impression that we are talking about
a kind of mental activity instead of a perspective assumed
with respect to the narrative/game. It seems to me that
the list 'actor, author, audience, gameplayer, character'
is closer to explaining itself than 'actor, author, audience,
puzzle-solver/tactician/problem-solver/whatever, character'.
The reason I haven't shortened it to 'player' is that 'player',
aside from being what we usually call a participant in
an RPG, is appropriately ambiguous for that usage: is the
context a game or a theatre?--and inappropriately
ambiguous for this one.

[Psychohist]

Keran posts, in part:

I do not think that the player of a game is properly
described as having an authorial relationship to it. The
designer is the one who lays claim to that.

[mention of "The Colossal Cave", "King's Quest", "The
Tomb of Horros"]

I'm not familiar with the specific titles you mention, but I assume they are
adventure modules - correct me if I'm wrong.

However, a module is not a narrative. You only get a narrative once a
gamesmaster takes a group of players through the module. And, for a well
designed module, that could happen in many different ways.

The designer of the module can't claim complete authorship of all the
adventures run using the module. The individual gamesmasters clearly have some
authorial input into the narrative consisting of a specific run through the
module.

And, if the gamesmaster is the 'hands off' type, much of the authoring gets
done by the players. Traditionally, for example, the player of the party
leader makes strategic decisions; these decisions can easily be made in an
authorial manner. ("I have a feeling we'll bypass most of the adventure if we
take the left fork back to the surface; let's take the right fork, since it'll
make a better story.)

So I would absolutely say that from the standpoint of the narrative stances,
players can have authorial input. In fact, I think Sarah explicitly mentioned
that in her essay.

Warren Dew

[Kevin R. Hardwick]

Keran wrote:

> Yes, this restricts the kinds of characters and plot structures
> I can achieve immersion with. I spent most of my playing time
> in author or character stance and I do not regard these as
> opposed to each other, but complementary; I need more
> scope as author than you have in the example above to
> reach immersion.

How very interesting--for me it is just the opposite--too much author
stance gets in the way of being immersive.

If I am conscious of the degree to which I am having to make authorial
decisions, that crowds out the sense of *being* the character. So
sometimes it is helpful for me to have the GM take responsibility for
authorial decisions--that frees me up to stop worrying about *authoring*
the character, and lets me become immersive. It helps that Mark is
quite respectful of this authorial role he occasionally assumes--that he
couches things more in the shape of suggestions than commands--something
like the co-author stance that Bruce described elsewhere.

Anyway, for me this division of responsibility has been very helpful.

Different strokes, I guess. But this does illuminate quite a bit about
our respective styles of play. Off hand, I'd say (judging by the
various posts on this board) that your style of play is lots more
typical than mine.

Maybe I'm just odd :)

My best,
Kevin

[Triad3204]

In article <6isaqs$1...@sjx-ixn1.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> writes:

>>But -- putting that aside -- I also think you're wrong. Dramatists are
>>interested in drama, drama is motivated by character -- hence the need for
>deep
>>characters.
>
>No, hence the need for characters - but not necessarily the need for "deep"
>characters. Are the characters in, say, Commedia Dell'Arte "deep" characters?
>Or is Commedia Dell'Arte not drama?

Remove the word "deep". The point stands. Stop playing semantics.

>>Simulationists attempt to simulate reality, reality has realistic
>>people in it -- hence the need for realistic characters.
>
>Simulationists don't always attempt to simulate reality - often they attempt
>to simulate genre settings. And simulations outside of the rpg threefold may
>not bother with realistic people at all - they may use Homo economius from
>econonimics or they may abstract people into populations.

"Reality" in roleplaying discussions often refers to situations which do not
conform to the world as we know it. And we *are* discussing roleplaying games.

>>Gamists are interested
>>in the game, the game requires you to have a means of solving problems -- it
>>does not require a personality.
>
>And in a roleplaying game, the problems exist in a gameworld and the means of
>solving those problems are characters within that gameworld. Something that
>lacks a gameworld and characters may be a game, but it isn't a roleplaying
>game. There are non-roleplaying games that don't fit into the threefold, just
>like there is non-roleplaying simulation that doesn't fit into the threefold
>and non-roleplaying drama that doesn't fit into the threefold.

Characters do not necessarily imply personality. I played roleplaying games for
a good six months to a year before my "characters" actually became characters
-- i.e. things with personalities and histories. I think this is the essential
thing you are missing -- characters in a roleplaying game *can* just be pieces
to manipulate. And for some people they are.

(Which is not to say this is the only type of "pure" gamist -- other gamists
may find the challenge of the game in the act of solving problems as someone
else.)

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Triad3204]

In article <199805072122...@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) writes:

>There are plenty of simulations that have nothing to do with people - even
>worlds don't have to have people in them. There are also simulations that do
>deal with people, but treat them in an aggregated way that doesn't require
>characters.

If the simulation does not involve characters then it does not involve roles
and, therefore, it is not a simulationist roleplaying game.

>Even from the standpoint of drama, I'd say that characters are not
>necessarily
>optional - there was a period when laser light shows were popular, and people
>went to see them for much the same reasons they'd go to see a stage play.

People also went to gladiatorial pits and bear baiting and cock fights and
football games for many of the same reasons as they go to the theatre -- that
doesn't make any of those things drama by any stretch of the imagination. Drama
requires characters -- 3000 years of literary history (at least, that's just
dating it to Aristotle) support this contention.

> Alternatively, there may be reasons for being interested in characters that
are
> related to neither simulation nor drama.

There are no such things -- unless you extend the definition of character to
an unacceptable degree.

Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lakes.com

[Red]

Magnus L. Hetland wrote:

> You could take a look at
> <URL:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898796350/002-2010569-4803049>
> where Amazon books have a shord description of the book.

Cool, thanks for the pointer

[Erol K Bayburt]

In article <35580ABF...@wt.infi.net>,

"Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:

>Erol K Bayburt wrote:
>
>> In article <35571DC6...@wt.infi.net>,
>> "Kevin R. Hardwick" <krhr...@wt.infi.net> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe it's just lack of sleep, but it seems to me that this is
>> streching the concept of 'assuming the role of a character' so far as
>> to make it meaningless.
>
>Well, I'm certainly willing to entertain the notion that I'm wrong :)
>
>But seriously, isn't this how it works in a movie, for you? A good
>movie, at least for me, is one in which whatever the conflict is that
>drives the movie *matters* to me, because I've identified with the
>protagonist. Bad movies typically fail to convince me that the driving
>conflict matters--sometimes because I cannot suspend disbelief, and more
>often because I just don't identify with the main character.
>

>Does drama work differently for you?

I think the term 'identify with' is confusing the issue, here. Let me put it
this way: A good story will have me thinking of the protagonists as friends,
but not as alter-egos. If I imagine myself in the story, it is as myself or
as a new character of my own creation, rather than as one of the already
existing characters in the story.

So I 'identify with' protagonists in stories in the same way I 'identify
with' friends in real life. In a rpg I 'identify with' my character in a
different and much stronger way.

When you watch (say) a James Bond movie, do you think of yourself *as* James
Bond? (Substitute some other movie and character if you find James Bond to be
bad movies.)

[Brett Evill]

In article <6j9f9u$i...@sjx-ixn5.ix.netcom.com>, Erol K Bayburt
<er...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>When you watch (say) a James Bond movie, do you think of yourself *as* James
>Bond? (Substitute some other movie and character if you find James Bond to be
>bad movies.)

No, but I feel with him in his triumph and disasters.