Simulationist Theory
G Benage
mkku...@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) writes:
>Here is an example from actual play of a player, rather than a GM,
>struggling with a simulationist/dramatist distinction.
[example snipped]
>In thinking this out, it became apparent to me that the main motivator
>is that *I* like this plan. It sounds exciting and fun--I'm keen to see
>Markus bait the vampire, and how she reacts, and how the crew reacts.
>This is essentially a dramatist motivation. I can show reasons within
the
>gameworld why Markus would do this (I'd rule the plan out a priori if I
>couldn't) but the fundamental motivation is at the player level. This
>is particularly apparent in how little emphasis I was able to put on the
>Captain's dislike for the plan as opposed to Markus' (and my) fondness
>for it.
So..."dramatist motivation" is an OOC motivation? A "simulationist
movitivation" would have indicated IC motivation, or, at least, IC
considerations would have been given priority?
I hope I'm not entirely missing your point, here. I'll wait for a
clarification
before I respond. :-)
Greg
Mary K. Kuhner
>In article <4ipgn0$g...@nntp4.u.washington.edu>,
>mkku...@phylo.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) writes:
[Markus baits a vampire because his player wants him to]
>So..."dramatist motivation" is an OOC motivation? A "simulationist
>motivation" would have indicated IC motivation, or, at least, IC
>considerations would have been given priority?
>I hope I'm not entirely missing your point, here. I'll wait for a
>clarification before I respond. :-)
>Greg
Yes, I think that's what I'm trying to say. A PC could choose an
action because *he* thought it was dramatic (Markus frequently does) but
I wouldn't consider that dramatist play; whereas if the player chooses
the action because *she* thinks it is dramatic, that's dramatist.
It need not be out of character in the sense of being wrong or jarring:
enough that it is being determined by a OOC mechanism. This is directly
analogous to a GM making a decision based on drama.
If I do too much of this, I will lose the intuitive IC grasp of the
character which is my great joy in roleplaying; hence I impose the
simulationist esthetic on myself, even though it can frustrate me (I'd
have been very sorry to miss the scene of Markus baiting the vampire,
but if it had been just a hair less well-founded I'd have been well
advised not to do it, because of the long-term damage). My usual GM
supports this because he knows it's important to me; I'm not sure he'd
insist, otherwise, though he is himself mostly a simulationist by
preference.
It's worth noting that most of my gaming, including all the recent
examples, is from one player/multiple character games. IC in such games
is notably tricky to achieve and maintain, so I take particular pains to
safeguard it. I would probably be a little less hard-line in a
multiplayer game. You'll want to take everything I say with a grain of
salt when applying it to "normal" games.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
John H Kim
in some ways inevitable, there are a number of ways to minimize it,
and a number of people consider that desirable.
The simplest is just to not have literary aspirations for the
campaign. By emotionally detaching herself from what happens to the
PC's, the push towards manipulation is lessened. Another helpful trick
is to work as much as possible out in advance, without prior knowledge
of the PC's or their situation.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
I'm going to detail some my "Modern Paranormals" game, which I
consider my most simulationist campaign to date. It was a true
simulation in that it was motivated by a "what if". I had been
running _Champions_ games for some time, but really I was not a
comics fan (this was before I found out about _Sandman_).
So I started with the concept: how could such superpowers
exist? Labelling it as "genetics" or "psionics" is an insufficient
answer since it still doesn't answer *how* such powers would operate.
I started to consider some possibilities. Beyond the nature of the
powers, I put some qualifiers -- I wanted the individuals who wielded
those powers to be powerful in a larger sense (i.e. not normal
schmucks with powers).
All this started to gel when I had a concept for an idea.
My early stuff resembled a comic book to some extent (holdovers from
earlier _Champions_ games), but when I went to college I purged such
influences from my world.
Quite frankly, I spent far more time developing the complete
history of the world than on anything which my players did. Heck,
I spent time working out the lives of paranormals who had died
before the game began. There were less than 200 paranormals in
history, and I was determined to have an outline on every one of
them.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
When the campaign rolled around, I decided to choose a premise
to push the PC's together and get them introduced. This was certainly
a dramatic nod -- the campaign was before I had a good concept of party
planning, otherwise I might have let the players determine for themselves
what held them together and how they started off.
My premise for the campaign was that the PC's were a group of
paranormals who were contacted by a man who had escaped from a
powerful secret society -- who wanted their help in finding out what
it was up to. Now, as it turned out, they ignored that premise -- the
shared knowledge was enough to pull them together, but they never did
investigate the Society. Instead, they took off in a completely
different direction.
Frankly, I had no idea what interested them -- I had been
designing this stuff not as plot hooks per se, but rather as ongoing
action and conflict between the NPC's. My premise was such that
there was *lots* of interesting stuff going on, primarily because
there were 70+ NPC's with similar powers as the PC's who were also
poking about, with their own projects, goals, etc.
Thus, when the PC's decided to go talk to with some
Washington-funded paranormals, I knew who they were and had some
idea what they were up to -- and with some time to prepare, I filled
in the details.
-*-*-*-
It was not a perfectly realistic campaign. There was a
bunch of hand-waving explanation of how superpowers worked (a bit
like FTL in a sci-fi game). Aside from the powers and the whole
backstory to them, I had two main differences from the real world:
-> Traumatic damage in people was less likely to lead to death.
This was an integrated part of the world, done primarily because
I needed both PC and NPC paranormals to be a bit more survivable
or they would be killed off too much (remember my "what if"
included their power/influence). Now, in truth, I could have
found a better in-game explanation, but I went with this because
it matched the default HERO system which I was using.
-> All the paranormals were given silly names, like Mobius. This
was primarily a mnemonic -- I found in the last game that none
of the players could remember who Jerry Kaehler was -- but with
the mnemonic it was much easier (they remembered not only the
power but also other aspects).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Kim | "Faith - Faith is an island in the setting sun.
jh...@columbia.edu | But Proof - Proof is the bottom line for everyone."
Columbia University | - Paul Simon, _Proof_
Kevin R. Hardwick
On 21 Mar 1996, John H Kim wrote:
> OK. While GM manipulation of events towards what he wants is
> in some ways inevitable, there are a number of ways to minimize it,
> and a number of people consider that desirable.
>
> The simplest is just to not have literary aspirations for the
> campaign. By emotionally detaching herself from what happens to the
> PC's, the push towards manipulation is lessened. Another helpful trick
> is to work as much as possible out in advance, without prior knowledge
> of the PC's or their situation.
Given your desires for the game, this sound like very sensible advice to
me--it certainly worked well for me in practice, when I was running games
of this nature.
As with anything else, there are trade-offs here. In this style of game,
especially in those in which the GM does a great deal of pre-planning,
you run the risk that the stuff happening in the world isn't all that
meaningful to the players. If the disjuncture is too extreme, this can
(IME) damage the game.
An example. A friend of mind is a Glorantha junkie. He set his game in
the Prax, and the central events in the game were the Lunar invasion of
the prax, culminating in the battle of Moonbroth (IIRC <g>) and the Lunar
occupation of Pavis.
One of the problems with this game was that this central back story
didn't engage any of the PCs particularly strongly. And so, while the
events of the back-setting were spectatcularly detailed, the whole thing
fell pretty flat. That aspect of the game wound up being pretty dull,
and most of us as players really wished that the GM would stop spending
so much time detailing it all for us.
I think alot depends on the expectations of the players in the game as
well. It isn't so much that we expected the GM to hand us a detailed
plot (although some of us in the game would not have objected if that is
what the GM had done) as that we wanted the detail in the game to be more
directed at what the charcaters were actually doing--that is, we wanted a
bit more drama in the game. Perhaps, for a group of players consisting
of John Kim and Scott Ruggles and Mary Kuhner, the approach taken in this
game might have worked better :)
All my best,
Kevin
Mary K. Kuhner
>One of the problems with this game was that this central back story
>didn't engage any of the PCs particularly strongly. And so, while the
>events of the back-setting were spectatcularly detailed, the whole thing
>fell pretty flat. That aspect of the game wound up being pretty dull,
>and most of us as players really wished that the GM would stop spending
>so much time detailing it all for us.
There's something else going on here besides just the simulationist
mindset: the GM made a judgement about what detail was worth
presenting and what wasn't, and it was the wrong judgement for his
players. This can happen in any kind of game, dramatist or
simulationist.
Sometimes this happens because the GM just doesn't know what his players
need--I run into this with my husband sometimes: I don't easily grasp
what his military characters are looking for when they survey a
landscape, so I tend to bore him by adding a lot of detail that the
character would in fact discount. (Who cares whether it's a pine or a
spruce?) Sometimes it happens because the GM is more interested in the
background material than in what the PCs are doing, an occupational
hazard of pre-planned material (either simulationist or dramatist).
I'm sure many of us have encountered the dreaded campaign where the
dramatic techniques are being used to accentuate an NPC's drama, rather
than a PC's, to the frustration of the players.
>Perhaps, for a group of players consisting
>of John Kim and Scott Ruggles and Mary Kuhner, the approach taken in this
>game might have worked better :)
Perhaps: but I might well have reacted the same way you did. When the
players choose their PCs, there is a contract that the GM will focus his
attention on them, no matter how interesting the background events are.
He doesn't have to *adjust* the background for their sake but he should
always be prepared to, well, background it.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Craig J Neumeier
I haven't really been following this thread (or even this group!)
consistently, but I thought I might add some details here:
> I'm going to detail some my "Modern Paranormals" game, which I
>consider my most simulationist campaign to date.
[snip]
> My premise for the campaign was that the PC's were a group of
>paranormals who were contacted by a man who had escaped from a
>powerful secret society -- who wanted their help in finding out what
>it was up to. Now, as it turned out, they ignored that premise -- the
>shared knowledge was enough to pull them together, but they never did
>investigate the Society. Instead, they took off in a completely
>different direction.
> Frankly, I had no idea what interested them -- I had been
>designing this stuff not as plot hooks per se, but rather as ongoing
>action and conflict between the NPC's. My premise was such that
>there was *lots* of interesting stuff going on, primarily because
>there were 70+ NPC's with similar powers as the PC's who were also
>poking about, with their own projects, goals, etc.
Let me say, as a player in this game, that it worked somewhat
differently from most of the games I've been in, and especially most
Champions games. When John says there weren't plot hooks per se, let me
note that very little of the stuff going on would naturally reach out and
grab the PCs; in this sense we were rarely drawn into things. And we
ended up ignoring some of the attempts to draw us in, as he says.
What we had instead were a lot of leads, mostly from the previous
histories worked out by the characters: everyone had contacts, old
grudges, and clues about things that might be happening. So we just
picked which bits to pursue, and soon enough ran across some sort of
horrendous plot (it *was* a Champions game, after all) -- three or four
of them, while I was playing. And there didn't have to be obvious ways
for us to approach the problems we ran across, either; one of the reasons
we ignored the Society was that the project looked awfully big for us to
handle.
It may be important that all paranormals were required to be
proactive personality types, so that there was little danger of the PCs
just sitting and waiting for stuff to happen.
The other group dynamic came about directly because John had described,
not to say boasted, about how detailed the background was -- at least once
we (the players) had the PCs take off in an unexpected direction at the
beginning of a play session just to see if the GM was *really* prepared
for us to do so. (Not that it was out of character, but it wasn't
required either.)
Craig Neumeier, LHN
Kevin R. Hardwick
On 22 Mar 1996, Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
> I'm sure many of us have encountered the dreaded campaign where the
> dramatic techniques are being used to accentuate an NPC's drama, rather
> than a PC's, to the frustration of the players.
Very nicely put, and yes, I *have* encountered such games (and, sad to
say, even run some of them :( ).
I think perhaps the novice dramatist GM is particularly susceptible to
this problem. The GM controls the NPCs, after all, and so the easiest
place to inject drama into a game, it might seem, would be to start
there. I think David's dictum about plot comes to the fore here :)
All my best,
Kevin
John H Kim
PC's being a near-requirement for successful simulationist games. What
I mean here is that for the game to have sustained actions, the PC's
must have driving goals which the players are interested in pursuing --
the "reluctant hero" and other dramatic staples don't work as well. I
am going to be replying to an old article of Kevin's on this thread, to
try to show this point in the context of his example.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Kevin R. Hardwick <krhr...@wam.umd.edu> wrote:
>In this style of game, especially in those in which the GM does a great
>deal of pre-planning, you run the risk that the stuff happening in the
>world isn't all that meaningful to the players. If the disjuncture is
>too extreme, this can (IME) damage the game.
>
>An example. A friend of mind is a Glorantha junkie. He set his game in
>the Prax, and the central events in the game were the Lunar invasion of
>the prax, culminating in the battle of Moonbroth (IIRC <g>) and the Lunar
>occupation of Pavis.
>
>One of the problems with this game was that this central back story
>didn't engage any of the PCs particularly strongly. And so, while the
>events of the back-setting were spectatcularly detailed, the whole thing
>fell pretty flat. That aspect of the game wound up being pretty dull,
>and most of us as players really wished that the GM would stop spending
>so much time detailing it all for us.
Right -- if I could, I would like some more info on this (real
game examples are always better than theoreticals, IMO).
As I see it, my conclusion if I were a player in that campaign
would probably be -- "Whoops! I've made a poor choice of PC -- perhaps
I'll switch to a character who is doing something I am more interested
in." I then might switch to a character who *was* involved in those
events. If what the characters are doing isn't interesting to you,
that is at least partially because you created a character whose
activities don't interest you.
Perhaps, he pictured the contract as a simulationist one -- i.e.
as GM, he will portray the world and its conflict, but it is up to you
to choose the characters and their goals to pursue things which interest
you. He was not going to bend around to create conflicts tailored to
your characters -- rather you were to create characters who were involved
in the world's conflicts.
-*-*-*-
A similar situation happened in a near-future _Champions_ game
I was involved in -- where I was playing Blackout (a character used in
previous examples on rgfa). When I first created Blackout, I conceived
of him as someone who was horrendously powerful, but basically dumb and
petty. However, after the first session, I found out that the rest of
the party was involved in subtle action against the oppressive World
Government and its machinations. As a dumb and petty brute, I was cut
off from all the secret stuff.
I decided at this point to one-up that, and rewrote Blackout
such that he was using his seeming lack of brains and ambition as a
cover for his terroristic activities. After specifying this, there
simply wasn't enough time for all the stuff I wanted to do. As a
psychotic terrorist, I had about four plans in motion at once, all the
while maintaining my cover with the rest of the party's actions. There
wasn't enough time between sessions to work out enough of my plans --
I would pester the GM with email notes.
Andrew Finch
: I decided at this point to one-up that, and rewrote Blackout
: such that he was using his seeming lack of brains and ambition as a
: cover for his terroristic activities. After specifying this, there
: simply wasn't enough time for all the stuff I wanted to do. As a
: psychotic terrorist, I had about four plans in motion at once, all the
: while maintaining my cover with the rest of the party's actions. There
: wasn't enough time between sessions to work out enough of my plans --
: I would pester the GM with email notes.
Can we say 'dramatic necessity'.
:)
David
Leon von Stauber
>
> The other group dynamic came about directly because John had described,
> not to say boasted, about how detailed the background was -- at least once
> we (the players) had the PCs take off in an unexpected direction at the
> beginning of a play session just to see if the GM was *really* prepared
> for us to do so.
So was he? ;)
______________________________________________________________
Leon von Stauber http://www.zilker.net/~leonvs/
Occam's Razor <leo...@occam.com>
Zilker Internet Park <leo...@zilker.net>
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