Simulation of Combat
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
I have been engaged in an unproductive conversation on this issue,
which as it has developed has focussed on a tangent which has
distracted from the conversation I would like to have.
So--'d like to pose the following problem to this group:
For some players--players who value the IC stance or the Immersive
stance over the others, and for whom certain kinds of mechanics are
distracting from their effort to inhabit this stance--existing
"wargamish" combat mechanics are more of a hindrance than a help to
simulating the experience of combat. This is in part because
"traditional" wargamish mechanics tend to focus on an objective "eye
in the sky" portrayal of the action, while for the IC or Immersive
player a more "first person" "ground's eye view" of the action may be
better.
As an example, while most of my players can firewall information to an
extent, there is a limit to their ability to do so. Thus, in a recent
game the PCs held a series of breachs in a wall during an attack on a
city. Despite the success of the center group of PCs, the two
flanking groups were forced back, and the center group then retreated
too. Afterwards the players commented on the action. The center
group players noted that while their decision to retreat could be
rationalized, they weren't certain they would have made that decision
if they had not also known about failure of the two flanking groups to
hold their position. Maybe they would have--but maybe not too. And
more important, none of them felt that they could see the action as
their characters would have seen it--because the players had too much
strategic information, which could not help but color their tactical
decisions.
Now I know how to deal with this problem in a mechanicless diceless or
semi-diceless game. But how might one deal with this problem in a
more mechanical fashion?
Thanks for your help.
Best,
Kevin
Keran
On Sun, 14 Sep 1997 16:46:40 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
<snip>
I'm not sure I understand how the issue of mechanics changes the
answer to the question: it seems to me that I'd encounter the same
problems with information presentation regardless of the resolution
method employed. I'm not sure I'm really addressing your question
correctly, therefore. However:
When I'm playing, I want a bird's-eye view of the local tactical
situation, in diagram and counters because it's a lot easier for me
to translate that into a useful construction of the scene than it is
verbal descriptions--I don't usually get anything coherent out of
verbal descriptions unless I take the time to draw a diagram anyway,
because I visualize very poorly without mechanical assistance, and
trying to deal with that wastes time and drops me out of IC because it
forces me to devote extensive effort to my own OOC handicap. I have a
much easier time telling what I *can't* see with diagrams, as well as
what I can. It's less disruptive to IC to immediately ignore an enemy
counter because I know it's behind me than it is to wonder whether I
should be ignoring it or not because I have no real idea of what's
where anyway (even when my character could plainly see some of it.)
A strictly first-person description without the overhead is, for me, a
better simulation of what it would be like for my character to try to
locate the action while blindfolded than it is a simulation of the
character's ordinary experience in combat.
Note, however, that I don't expect the overhead view to extend to
the strategic situation, if there is one, unless my character happens
to be in a vantage point where he could see a significant part of the
battlefield. I would usually treat the strategic and tactical aspects
of the fight differently.
Keran
kera...@mail1.nai.net
http://nw3.nai.net/~keranset/
keranset.telmaron.com 5252
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
For some players ... for whom certain kinds of
mechanics are distracting ... existing "wargamish"
combat mechanics are more of a hindrance than a help
to simulating the experience of combat....
Now I know how to deal with this problem in a
mechanicless diceless or semi-diceless game. But
how might one deal with this problem in a
more mechanical fashion?
Find players who prefer the immersive stance, who find gamesmaster
generated subjective impressions detrimental to this stance, and who are
good at firewalling appropriate portions of information presented in an
'objective' way (mechanics, miniatures, or the like).
In the example you give, though, where one group of players may have been
influenced by what was going on with another group of characters, there's a
firewalling issue no matter what you do, as long as all the players are in
the same room. The only way you can completely remove this firewalling
problem is to handle each group of players - or in the extreme, each player
- separately, while everyone else is out of the room.
Generally, that's too time consuming. In this case, you present the
information in the way that is easiest for your players to firewall -
perhaps taking into account other factors, like whether your players feel
that a particular method of communication (verbal, visual, mechanical,
whatever) provides enough bandwidth to support their preferred mode of play.
There are some specific techniques that can be used to help discourage
'hive minding' of information between separated groups of player
characters. But the techniques I know of are equally applicable to
mechanical and free form games.
Warren Dew
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Sun, 14 Sep 1997 17:59:03 GMT, kera...@mail1.nai.net (Keran)
wrote:
>I'm not sure I understand how the issue of mechanics changes the
>answer to the question: it seems to me that I'd encounter the same
>problems with information presentation regardless of the resolution
>method employed. I'm not sure I'm really addressing your question
>correctly, therefore. However:
Well, I agree with you. But in the earlier conversation, some people
suggested that what I am striving for is attainable only in
mechanicless games. So this was a nod in their direction--and an
attempt to forestall that particular criticism.
>When I'm playing, I want a bird's-eye view of the local tactical
>situation, in diagram and counters because it's a lot easier for me
>to translate that into a useful construction of the scene than it is
>verbal descriptions--I don't usually get anything coherent out of
>verbal descriptions unless I take the time to draw a diagram anyway,
>because I visualize very poorly without mechanical assistance, and
>trying to deal with that wastes time and drops me out of IC because it
>forces me to devote extensive effort to my own OOC handicap. I have a
>much easier time telling what I *can't* see with diagrams, as well as
>what I can.
Fair enough--and were you one of my players, I'd most surely want to
know this.
That said, suppose I gave you a diagram that laid out what your
character could see. Would that help you visualize the situation?
>A strictly first-person description without the overhead is, for me, a
>better simulation of what it would be like for my character to try to
>locate the action while blindfolded than it is a simulation of the
>character's ordinary experience in combat.
But not all overheads have to be third-person. What you are
describing is an issue of how one presents the data, but it does not
foreclose a first person description. I can easily communicate with
you via diagrams and still maintain the integrity of the approach I am
advocating.
Now--let me assume for the moment that you find a third person diagram
more suitable for maintaining IC and Immersion than a first person
diagram. If this is the case, can you explain why? This is where the
issue lies, it seems to me (at least so far as you are concerned :)
and it would help me considerably if you could explain it.
Best,
Kevin
A Lapalme
(krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net) writes:
>
> For some players--players who value the IC stance or the Immersive
> stance over the others, and for whom certain kinds of mechanics are
> distracting from their effort to inhabit this stance--existing
> "wargamish" combat mechanics are more of a hindrance than a help to
> simulating the experience of combat. This is in part because
> "traditional" wargamish mechanics tend to focus on an objective "eye
> in the sky" portrayal of the action, while for the IC or Immersive
> player a more "first person" "ground's eye view" of the action may be
> better.
>
> As an example, while most of my players can firewall information to an
> extent, there is a limit to their ability to do so. Thus, in a recent
> game the PCs held a series of breachs in a wall during an attack on a
> city. Despite the success of the center group of PCs, the two
> flanking groups were forced back, and the center group then retreated
> too. Afterwards the players commented on the action. The center
> group players noted that while their decision to retreat could be
> rationalized, they weren't certain they would have made that decision
> if they had not also known about failure of the two flanking groups to
> hold their position. Maybe they would have--but maybe not too. And
> more important, none of them felt that they could see the action as
> their characters would have seen it--because the players had too much
> strategic information, which could not help but color their tactical
> decisions.
>
> Now I know how to deal with this problem in a mechanicless diceless or
> semi-diceless game. But how might one deal with this problem in a
> more mechanical fashion?
>
I'm unclear as to how mechanics even enter the picture. Are you saying
that the problem stemmed from the fact that the players were given a
bird's eye view of the situation? If so, you could still use mechanics
without providing any more information than one would do in a more
freeform situation. Simply describe the situation the exact same way.
I get the feeling you are using mechanical to mean something slightly
different here... :(
************
BTW, can we stop using the word "objective" to describe the bird's eye
view approach? Why would it be more objective than the charcter POV
approach? The only difference with the bird's eye view approach is that all
the _players_ see the same
thing. However, they know no more about the "real" situation than in
character POV view. [Unless, of course, the GM is providing the players
with stats on the opposition, including morale factors, battle goals etc..
And, if the GM is doing that, it's not even a wargame; just an
exercise in making the players believe they are great tacticians (which
would make, I guess, a social dynamics issue :) ).]
Alain
--
Can-Games XXI - the largest and longest running Gaming Convention in Canada
http://www.magmacom.com/~sharvey/cangames.htm - Sept 19-21, 1997
Mary K. Kuhner
>Now--let me assume for the moment that you find a third person diagram
>more suitable for maintaining IC and Immersion than a first person
>diagram. If this is the case, can you explain why? This is where the
>issue lies, it seems to me (at least so far as you are concerned :)
>and it would help me considerably if you could explain it.
Not to butt in here, Kevin, but it seems to me that we had a similar
discussion a year or two ago, as part of a larger debate about providing
subjective versus objective information to players.
One issue that I recall coming up is that some players are accustomed to
"subjectivizing" the data they receive, and tend to do so automatically.
If you provide them pre-subjectivized data, this produces a double
whammy as they unthinkingly subjectivize it again.
For example, if I am playing a terribly cautious character, I naturally
interpret everything I'm told about his surroundings as wickedly as I
can. If the GM is already skewing the presentation to make it sound
as wicked as *he* can, the poor character may end up cowering in a
corner, afraid of his own shadow. Even if I know this is happening
it's so much a part of my style to re-interpret the data according to
the character's mindset that it's hard for me to stop. The awareness
of the process is, for me, part of "being in character".
Perhaps some people find objective views of combat more useful for IC
than subjective for related reasons. Their play style involves the
translation of external data into internal PC perceptions; they
need relatively unflavored external data so as not to mess up this
process.
I haven't done a lot of highly subjectivized combat, so I'm not sure how
I personally would feel about this.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Psychohist
Mary Kuhner posts, in part:
Perhaps some people find objective views of
combat more useful for IC than subjective for
related reasons. Their play style involves the
translation of external data into internal PC
perceptions; they need relatively unflavored
external data so as not to mess up this process.
No 'perhaps' about it. All my players basically fall into this category.
Warren
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 14 Sep 1997 23:19:50 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>Find players who prefer the immersive stance, who find gamesmaster
>generated subjective impressions detrimental to this stance, and who are
>good at firewalling appropriate portions of information presented in an
>'objective' way (mechanics, miniatures, or the like).
Not an option, I'm sorry to say.
A, I have never met a player who prefers the immersive stance and does
not also prefer the first person perspective to the third, in practice
if not in theory :)
And B., I play with the players with whom I play because I want to
play with those particular people. So its either accomodate their
preferences, or don't play at all. I'll take the first option :)
Regarding point A, above, I'm sure such players exist. But I don't
know any.
Best,
Kevin
Mark Grundy
Kevin Hardwick wrote of delivering strategic information
mechanically and linking it to character experiences:
| The center group players noted that while their decision to retreat
| could be rationalized, they weren't certain they would have made that
| decision if they had not also known about failure of the two flanking
| groups to hold their position.
[...]
| Now I know how to deal with this problem in a mechanicless diceless or
| semi-diceless game. But how might one deal with this problem in a
| more mechanical fashion?
In Pendragon there are a lot of wars, and they're often interlaced
with passions and personalities. This question comes up a bit there,
for obvious reasons. So here's an idea for delivering strategic
information to the players just through the info their characters can
see. You can moderate this with dice or not, as you like.
Give the players some early descriptions of notable heroes on their
own and other sides, and get them to meet up with some NPC runners and
communicators. The more strategic battle skills they have, the more of
these kinds of links they should get.
As the battle changes strategically, have those changes reflected
through what the heroes, runners and communicators are doing. Are the
heroes idle and in reserve? Are they committed to where the players
are, or are they off somewhere else? Are the runners idle, waiting for
instructions, or are they racing frantically, carrying messages back and
forth? These things all give a picture of the strategic situation.
So for Kevin's example of overrun flanks, maybe the centre has a
fair complement of heroes, and they're fighting pretty well. Runners
come and go fairly regularly, just keeping contact with separate parts
of the battle. And the runners come after a while and request some
reinforcements for the flanks, so this draws some of the heroes away.
After a while, the runners stop coming at all, and the allied heroes
don't return. How much of this you tell the players depends on how much
of this you feel they should notice -- depending on dice rolls or other
mechanisms. The more they know about the forces and likely strategies
in the conflict, the more sense this kind of stuff can make to them.
As for actually generating the combat results, you can continue to
use whatever mechanism suits you -- just don't share it with the players
as-is unless it can be expressed in some locally visible way.
---
Dr Mark Grundy, DCS, Phone: +61-2-6249 3785
Education Co-ordinator, Fax: +61-2-6249 0010
CRC for Advanced Computational Systems,
The Australian National University, Web: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Mark.Grundy
0200 Australia Email: Mark....@anu.edu.au
John H Kim
Another reply to Kevin here concerning the comparison of
combat from the "objective" bird's-eye viewpoint versus the GM
giving subjective first-person descriptions to each of the players.
Personally, I see myself as an Immersive player who
prefers objective descriptions and diagrams (although not neccesarily
counters). My experience has been such that I simply don't trust
the GM to give an accurate subjective description for my PC.
Frankly, unless the pacing slows down to a crawl, I can't
explain everything which is happening in my character's head -- and
the GM can't describe everything she sees. For example, my usually
cold assassin might suddenly experience an emotional crisis during
stress -- and he no longer cares if he lives or dies.
-*-*-*-
Kevin Hardwick <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
>As an example, while most of my players can firewall information to an
>extent, there is a limit to their ability to do so. Thus, in a recent
>game the PCs held a series of breachs in a wall during an attack on
>a city. Despite the success of the center group of PCs, the two
>flanking groups were forced back, and the center group then retreated
>too. Afterwards the players commented on the action. The center
>group players noted that while their decision to retreat could be
>rationalized, they weren't certain they would have made that decision
>if they had not also known about failure of the two flanking groups to
>hold their position. Maybe they would have--but maybe not too. And
>more important, none of them felt that they could see the action as
>their characters would have seen it--because the players had too much
>strategic information, which could not help but color their tactical
>decisions.
Kevin, I don't see that this is an issue of firewalling
information in general. As GM, even if I am using a bird's-eye
viewpoint, I don't include information that *none* of the PC's
see. Just because I have a battle map doesn't mean that I place
counters for invisible opponents.
The point that I have raised several times here is that the
subjective experience provides just as much -- in fact usually *more*
information than the objective bird's-eye view. You may still
prefer the subjective approach -- perhaps because it is easier for
your players to firewall other PC's subjective descriptions than it
is for them to firewall an objective viewpoint.
Personally, I find the descriptions given to other players
distracting mostly for what they tell me about their PC whom
I have to continue to deal with for a while. It is relatively
easy for me to firewall factual information about a battle. It is
more tricky for me to firewall a subjective impression of a
character.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>Now I know how to deal with this problem in a mechanicless diceless or
>semi-diceless game. But how might one deal with this problem in a
>more mechanical fashion?
I don't see what mechanics has to do with it. If there
are no PC's in the flanking forces, then don't describe what
happens there to the players. If you are feeling excessively
mechanical, then perhaps you would resolve the fight to
yourself by such. However, I've only known one GM who would
resolve large scale NPC-vs-NPC fights by strict mechanics
(and even then using a simplified large-scale combat system,
not blow-by-blow personal combat).
If there are PC's in the flanking forces, then I am curious
what your mechanicless solution would be. It seems to me that the
only solution would be to take the "flank" players out of the room
to resolve their side of the combat -- and you as GM move from
room to room. If you had a second GM this could be much simpler
(I've done this before).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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_
John H Kim
This is another reply to Kevin concerning the question of
preference of description in combat scenes -- this one following up
on his reply to Keran. The two possibilities suggested are:
1) The GM gives a single description to all players, plus an
overhead diagram of the area. If there are 5 or more moving
combatants, then probably he will put a large diagram down
on the table and put counters on it to represent the positions
of moving combatants. This is what Kevin calls "third-person"
or "objective" description.
2) The GM gives an individualized description to each player.
He may show an overall diagram of the area. However, any
of the changing conditions (i.e. moving combatants, etc.) are
only described via GM verbal descriptions. This is what Kevin
call "first-person" or "subjective" description.
I have no problem believing that first-person description
works and is preferred by some (or many) Immersive players.
However, here I will continue with why I usually prefer
option (1).
As a note here, these two can meld together. Unless the
GM does a fair bit of work in editting her descriptions to match
the PC in question, then the individual descriptions will just
be cosmetic variations of the third-person view. Thus, I assume
that for (2) the GM is significantly varying the descriptions to
account for the player.
-*-*-*-
Kevin Hardwick <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
>> A strictly first-person description without the overhead is, for me, a
>> better simulation of what it would be like for my character to try to
>> locate the action while blindfolded than it is a simulation of the
>> character's ordinary experience in combat.
>
>But not all overheads have to be third-person. What you are describing
>is an issue of how one presents the data, but it does not foreclose
>a first person description. I can easily communicate with you via
>diagrams and still maintain the integrity of the approach I am
>advocating.
How would a first-person overhead diagram differ from a
third-person overhead diagram? Would you really make four different
drawings for the four players?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>Now--let me assume for the moment that you find a third person diagram
>more suitable for maintaining IC and Immersion than a first person
>diagram. If this is the case, can you explain why? This is where the
>issue lies, it seems to me (at least so far as you are concerned :)
>and it would help me considerably if you could explain it.
1) It slows down pacing significantly to have the GM successively
reinterpret the same reality into multiple subjective
perspectives.
2) In my experience, first-person descriptions more often lead to
assumption clashes -- like a player thinks his character is
standing beside a wall when the GM thinks he is out in the open.
This is a regular feature of the first-person-description combats
I have been in.
I would guess that this is because with only one description,
there is less chance for the GM to develop consistency mistakes.
The more operations required of him, the more likely he is to
make mistakes in his descriptions or in his internal modelling.
It's like a game of Operator: the more often the GM repeats
the process of describing what is going on, the more likely a
mistake will creep in.
Incidentally, I would presume that Kevin's combats do not
have this feature -- I am curious as to how he avoids them.
3) Listening to the first-person descriptions to other players
is distracting to me. I have a harder time firewalling
emotional/subjective impressions than I do factual data.
If the descriptions really reflect their true inner character,
then it will be hard for me to shake that impression on
an emotional-type level.
4) This method seems like it would make it more difficult for
PC's to change under stress (because then the GM won't know
how to tailor their descriptions). I have had this happen many
times in third-person description games: my character reacts
differently under stress than is expected by either the GM or
even me. Then I have to drop OOC to describe this change to
the GM or be forced to wade through presumably inappropriate
descriptions.
Keran
On Mon, 15 Sep 1997 01:15:26 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
>On Sun, 14 Sep 1997 17:59:03 GMT, kera...@mail1.nai.net (Keran)
>wrote:
>
<snip>
>>When I'm playing, I want a bird's-eye view of the local tactical
>>situation, in diagram and counters because it's a lot easier for me
>>to translate that into a useful construction of the scene than it is
>>verbal descriptions--I don't usually get anything coherent out of
>>verbal descriptions unless I take the time to draw a diagram anyway,
>>because I visualize very poorly without mechanical assistance, and
>>trying to deal with that wastes time and drops me out of IC because it
>>forces me to devote extensive effort to my own OOC handicap. I have a
>>much easier time telling what I *can't* see with diagrams, as well as
>>what I can.
>
>Fair enough--and were you one of my players, I'd most surely want to
>know this.
>
>That said, suppose I gave you a diagram that laid out what your
>character could see. Would that help you visualize the situation?
Yes.
>>A strictly first-person description without the overhead is, for me, a
>>better simulation of what it would be like for my character to try to
>>locate the action while blindfolded than it is a simulation of the
>>character's ordinary experience in combat.
>
>But not all overheads have to be third-person. What you are
>describing is an issue of how one presents the data, but it does not
>foreclose a first person description. I can easily communicate with
>you via diagrams and still maintain the integrity of the approach I am
>advocating.
I was thinking of the overhead as necessarily third-person because
it's not presented from the same perspective as the character sees
it (unless the character is fact airborne). It's occurring to me now
that a ground level diagram of what my character sees would be
just as suitable from my perspective as a player--indeed, it would
be more suitable in certain respects.
>Now--let me assume for the moment that you find a third person diagram
>more suitable for maintaining IC and Immersion than a first person
>diagram. If this is the case, can you explain why? This is where the
>issue lies, it seems to me (at least so far as you are concerned :)
>and it would help me considerably if you could explain it.
The main objection to ground views instead of overheads is that it
would impose a much heavier burden on the GM to keep them current:
a small change in the character's position can lead to an enormous
change in what the scene looks like.
I like ground views because they do convey the subjective point of
view better, and I often include visuals of the horizon from the major
locations in my campaigns along with the overhead map of the area,
but it usually takes 8 ground level projections to convey a sense of
what you see in what direction from a particular location, whereas
someone who's any good at interpreting topographical maps can get
a passable sense of the whole scene from a single overhead. If you
consider the difficulty of doing ground-level panoramic sweeps during
combat for, say, 4 characters who're moving around, it looks like a
crushing amount of work to lay on the GM. You usually have to include
what's behind, and the periphery, because if a character has been
walking through the landscape he usually has some sense of where
the fixed objects behind him are.
I don't have any problem taking first person descriptions and
integrating them into overhead diagrams, particularly, except that
I usually have difficulty following the enemy's small scale motions
that don't get included on the diagram--what he's doing with
his sword, e.g.
Similar difficulties crop up whenever I'm presented with non-
combat problems where I have to visualize some sort of apparatus
with at least some accuracy to figure out what it is or how it works.
I'm still dealing with objective information, above--the question of
what's where when. I've devoted a lot of thought to it because,
unfortunately, in my chosen medium (online in realtime) I don't
get to use diagrams--I can't transmit or receive a sketch made
on the spot fast enough for combat resolution. I've played one
combat I considered satisfactory from a dramatic standpoint,
if not from a tactical standpoint; I've never GMed one I thought
was any good.
As GM I manage to maintain a fair grasp of large-scale static
scenes and objects by doing a lot of drawing and mapping
(perhaps as a sort of pigheaded compensation for my inability
to visualize, I'm the game's most dedicated graphic artist--it's
the only way I can see my characters--and I've worked as a
draftsman.) This is a significant help for keeping track of what's
where on a strategic level, but it's less useful on a tactical
level--I certainly haven't drawn every room the players are ever
going to be in--and of course I don't get to do it for somebody
else's campaign.
For the what's where when problem, I'd be inclined to regard
a ground level panorama as an interesting luxury, but I can
easily make do with an overhead. This part of the question
has a relatively simple answer for me: the ideal case would be
to see (and hear) everything in position and time exactly as the
character perceives it, but I can easily interpret a bird's-eye view
well enough for it to serve. Having a diagram is in every case
vastly preferable to not having it, for me, regardless of any other
factors in the presentation: I firewall better than I visualize
unassisted.
The other problem is: having determined what's where when,
what does it mean to the character, and how do you present
it? This seems to me to be a more complex problem.
Do we mean 'what does it mean to the character tactically',
or 'what does it mean to the character emotionally'?
Consider the tactical angle. Is the player more, or less aware
tactically than the character? And how familiar is the player
with the particular milieu in which the combat is taking place?
A player familiar with the medieval order of battle (insofar as
we know it at all) may immediately draw conclusions about
a paucity of pikes among the enemy's foot not apparent to
a player unfamiliar with it; if the second player's character is
supposed to be aware of this stuff, the GM is going to have
to add some interpretation to the raw data. I certainly want
to hear what information means in context, as a player, if
I'm unfamiliar with the context and the character would be
aware of it. That kind of contextual interpretation about the
setting seems to me to add to verisimilitude; I frequently add
it outside of combat.
On the other hand, I'd likely find interpretation of the scene's
emotional impact on the character intrusive. I could see a GM
making assumptions along the lines, say, that someone who
had never been physically attacked would find the sudden offer
of violence terrifying and overwhelming, especially if they
had no training. However, this isn't necessarily so: if some
people would react with overpowering fear, others might
experience a surge of aggression, and still others might find
themselves detached from emotion at the time, only to
experience reaction later. There's a difference between
a tactical sort of mind and training in physical combat;
there's a difference between having experience in a real
modern firefight, and familiarity with the medieval order of
battle.
Take two characters: let one be the sort who, by nature,
would panic at a physical threat, but he has learned to
overcome and use the fear through long training and
combat experience. Let the other be a cold-blooded analytical
sort who's accustomed to dealing with severe non-physical
threats to his well-being dispassionately and logically, but
without combat experience. Perhaps his dispassion will
desert him in physical peril and perhaps it won't: it's very
difficult to tell ahead of time. Indeed, the character himself
probably wouldn't know.
I should think that the subjective experiences of these characters in
combat would be very different, and it would be very hard to pitch
descriptions at them that would hit the nuances completely correctly,
especially when you have to do it quickly enough not to drag out
resolution. The chances of the GM's mischaracterizing the experience
to the player by missing the subtleties appear to me to be very high.
This seems to me to be the sort of thing that ought to be left to the
player, unless the GM knows the character very well and has a lot of
time to devote to him individually.
I suppose, then, that you could say the answer really depends on which
parts of a subjective first-person description we're talking about.
scott....@3do.com
In article <341c8c36...@news.washingtonian.infi.net>,
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net wrote:
>
> On 14 Sep 1997 23:19:50 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>
> >Find players who prefer the immersive stance, who find gamesmaster
> >generated subjective impressions detrimental to this stance, and who are
> >good at firewalling appropriate portions of information presented in an
> >'objective' way (mechanics, miniatures, or the like).
>
> Not an option, I'm sorry to say.
>
> A, I have never met a player who prefers the immersive stance and does
> not also prefer the first person perspective to the third, in practice
> if not in theory :)
Kevin, I am one of those players. i prefer immersive play, and prefer the
GM's descriptions to be in third person objective, because the way I
play, is that i the player need to build th visuals that my character
'sees' so that I can then determine what his actions will be next.
'Subjective' descriptions, 'slanted' to the GM's external perception of
the character is less than useful information, to me, bacause it has been
'filtered' and usually filtered wrong. I prefer to let the character's
perceptions do the filtering.
I game with three or four other players of similar technique. So we may
not be all that rare.
>
> And B., I play with the players with whom I play because I want to
> play with those particular people. So its either accomodate their
> preferences, or don't play at all. I'll take the first option :)
Tht is a very valid point. Looking back on things, we have just about
weeded all the dramatists out of who we prefer to play with. They have
found their owen grups, but we still see eachother around the holidays.
>
> Regarding point A, above, I'm sure such players exist. But I don't
> know any.
>
(Raises his hand!)
Scott
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Mark Grundy
Mary writes:
| Not to butt in here, Kevin, but it seems to me that we had a similar
| discussion a year or two ago, as part of a larger debate about
| providing subjective versus objective information to players.
| One issue that I recall coming up is that some players are accustomed
| to "subjectivizing" the data they receive, and tend to do so
| automatically. If you provide them pre-subjectivized data, this
| produces a double whammy as they unthinkingly subjectivize it again.
I agree that this can tread on character perception toes, and that
it's frustrating to players who already subjectivise. For myself, I
like GMs to just give me the objective character experiences, and let me
fill in the colour; otherwise it feels like role-cueing.
There seem to be two issues here, though:
* Local knowledge versus global knowledge
* Subjective information versus objective information
For Kevin's example, there are ways to communicate objective
evidence for `heavy activity on the flanks, and sudden silence', and
leave it up to players to decide in-character whether this means
`overrun' to them or not -- this is the core of an earlier suggestion I
posted to this thread. In the face of real-life ignorance, personality
as much as skill may decide the interpretation, so there are simulation
as well as drama benefits of doing it this way.
Phil Keast
On 15 Sep 1997 19:55:22 GMT, jh...@sawasdee.cc.columbia.edu (John H
Kim) wrote:
>Kevin Hardwick <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
>>Now--let me assume for the moment that you find a third person diagram
>>more suitable for maintaining IC and Immersion than a first person
>>diagram. If this is the case, can you explain why? This is where the
>>issue lies, it seems to me (at least so far as you are concerned :)
>>and it would help me considerably if you could explain it.
>
> 2) In my experience, first-person descriptions more often lead to
> assumption clashes -- like a player thinks his character is
> standing beside a wall when the GM thinks he is out in the open.
> This is a regular feature of the first-person-description combats
> I have been in.
I tried in one particular campaign to implement a "first-person"
filter. Having at the time recently completed a degree in Psychology I
became concerned that characters/players tended to be presented with
far more accurate and comprehensive information than occurs in "real
life". Accordingly I provided the information that would reasonably be
automatically noticed or perceived by the characters. The result was a
disaster that almost never made it to the second session. The plaers
were extremely upset when, in a stressful situation, they told me what
their characters were attempt and I pointed out that the situation, on
closer examination, was not what they thought. Even though my original
descriptions of the situation were accurate, albeit ambiguous and
incomplete, the players insisted that I must have changed the layout
or somehow confused myself. The possibility that the characters, who
arrived during a snowstorm under the influence of a summoning, didn't
know the relative positions of the doors of each of the buildings on
the farmstead was, to them, unbelievable.
While I admit that I may well have executed my attempts to filter
information through a first-person perspective poorly, noentheless it
weems clear to me that for that particular group (and to be honest,
looking back, possibly to myself if I'd been playing), proper
visualisation requires knowing the actual situation and screening out
irrellevancies, NOT working with incomplete or inaccurate information.
FWIW, these are people who are generally all considered excellent
RPers, all of whom have a shelf full of RPing awards won at
conventions and some of whom have written RPG scenarios which have
been published, and we long ago discarded battlemaps and the like.
Nonetheless it is essential for these players (and many others I
suspect) to have a certain minimum amount of information above and
beyond what the characters actually possess so that everyone, players
and GM, agree on such issues as the physical layout of the terrain,
and where the PCs and those NPCs which are revealed are relative to
each others. Assumption clash, collapse of simulation, collapse of
characterization, and suspicions of 'unfairness' arise if there is a
discrepency in how individual players (including the GM) visualise a
situation. First person tailored descriptions can, IME, lead to such
divergence of visualiation. Third person descriptions, whether it be
maps and counters or merely detailed verbal descriptions, avoid such
situations.
Take care out there ;)
Phil K. (Melbourne, Australia)
[P.K...@latrobe.edu.au]
Psychohist
John Kim posts, in part:
In my experience, first-person descriptions more often
lead to assumption clashes -- like a player thinks his
character is standing beside a wall when the GM thinks
he is out in the open. This is a regular feature of
the first-person-description combats I have been in.
I would guess that this is because with only one
description, there is less chance for the GM to develop
consistency mistakes.
My experience with first person descriptions is similar in terms of the
prevalence and types of of assumption clash.
In my experience, though, the issue is not that the gamesmaster allows
inconsistencies to creep in. Rather, it's that some key pieces of
information about the gamesmaster's view of the situation don't get
transmitted to the appropriate players.
For example, as gamesmaster, I may describe to Kevin a wall that runs past
both Kevin's character and John's character. I may then omit repeating the
description of the wall to John, assuming he knows about it from listening
to my description to Kevin. If in fact John was trying to minimize his
firewalling burden by not listening to my description to Kevin, he won't
know about the wall - thus the assumption clash.
Even though I use figures, this issue used to come up frequently in night
encounters. Nonimmersive players would sometimes forget that it was dark
except for areas lit by campfires and torches. I haven't had this problem
for some years now - either my players have gotten more immersive, or I've
gotten better at mentioning lighting issues when necessary (most likely both).
Warren
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 15 Sep 1997 02:46:27 GMT, mkku...@phylo.genetics.washington.edu
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>Not to butt in here, Kevin, but it seems to me that we had a similar
>discussion a year or two ago, as part of a larger debate about providing
>subjective versus objective information to players.
You are not butting in at all--you are one of the people I hoped would
respond.
I'm not really looking for people to tell me whether this approach is
*theoretically* viable or not--nor am I looking for people to chime in
"this works for me" or "this does not work for me." What I'm looking
for is help working through this approach, given that it is what my
players seem to want. I want to find some way to satisfy the
preferences of the particular group of people for whom I am planning
to run.
Anyway, yes, we most certainly did discuss similar issues about a year
ago--it is on the basis of that conversation that I am proceeding now.
>One issue that I recall coming up is that some players are accustomed to
>"subjectivizing" the data they receive, and tend to do so automatically.
>If you provide them pre-subjectivized data, this produces a double
>whammy as they unthinkingly subjectivize it again.
Exactly. The way I handle this now is to give sparse descriptions,
which the player can subjectivize as they please. However, I also try
to take into account the physical perception of the character as I
make my descriptions. This includes more than the merely what the
character can sense (since percpetion is more than the data the
perceiving organs receive--it is also what the brain does with that
information) but it does not include any attempt by me to analyze the
data in terms of the predispositions of the character. (I'll continue
this thought below,)
>For example, if I am playing a terribly cautious character, I naturally
>interpret everything I'm told about his surroundings as wickedly as I
>can. If the GM is already skewing the presentation to make it sound
>as wicked as *he* can, the poor character may end up cowering in a
>corner, afraid of his own shadow.
Right. I try not to skew the presentation in this fashion. But I
also try to take into account the character's ability to interpret
data when I give descriptions. Yes--this absolutely is a balancing
act, and I most certainly do expect to screw it up from time to time.
The question is whether or not the pay off when I get it right is
worth the cost when I get it wrong :)
So--the building is burning, flames are shooting out the windows. To
the one character, a computer programmer with no experience in this
sort of thing, I say "the building is on fire, and flames are shooting
out the windows." To the other character, who is a professional
fire-fighter, I say "the building is on fire, flames are shooting out
the windows, but in you have seen situations like this before, and you
probably have three or four minutes before it gets so hot that you
could not possibly survive in there, and maybe twice that long before
the building starts to collapse." The perceptions are the same, but
the one character has the training and experience to interpret the
data much more precisely, and so I give a more precise description.
Its not a matter of the additional character or emotional layer of
interpretation (my character is disposed to be cautious) but rather of
skill and training, which I try to take this into account when I give
descriptions. I leave the predispositions to the player, but I try to
take the skill and training into account whenever I can. It is a fine
line, and not always an obvious one.
I also try to leave room in my descriptions for dialogue with the
player--to take additional questions. Here is one place where the
player has a chance to role-play the cautiousness of the character--by
asking lots of questions, "just to be sure its safe."
Anyway, your point is valid, to my way of thinking. The danger you
describe is quite real, and the subjectivism you describe most
definietly IS how some of my players approach the game. The question
that is relevant for me, as I try to prepare to run, is whether or not
the kind of approach I outlline above can mitigate this danger to any
degree. Or maybe I'm not thinking about this in the most productive
fashion, and some other approach can solve my problem.
>Perhaps some people find objective views of combat more useful for IC
>than subjective for related reasons. Their play style involves the
>translation of external data into internal PC perceptions; they
>need relatively unflavored external data so as not to mess up this
>process.
Well, I have not experimented much with the subjective approach to
combat either, save at the very end of the Bevon game--which is why I
bring it up here. The trouble I'm facing is that some of my players
find the standard approach to combat--which is what I've been using up
to now--distracting and intrusive and destructive of their ability to
be IC.
That is a problem. Warren's suggestion that I find new players is not
an option--I LIKE these people; I run the game in part to stay in
contact with them.
I may or may not be able to find a way to deal with it. What I have
been describing is my first take at dealing with it, as I run through
the issues in my head. I'd like to have a much better idea of what I
am doing, however, before I actually try to implement this approach in
the new game. Hence this thread :)
My best,
Kevin
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
Thanks John, for taking this seriously. I'm glad you are
participating in this conversation . . .
> The two possibilities suggested are:
>
>1) The GM gives a single description to all players, plus an
> overhead diagram of the area. If there are 5 or more moving
> combatants, then probably he will put a large diagram down
> on the table and put counters on it to represent the positions
> of moving combatants. This is what Kevin calls "third-person"
> or "objective" description.
Yes. I'm not wedded to the terminology, btw. Do you think it is
confusing or misleading? Should we look for something better to
characterize the distinction I'm trying to get at?
>2) The GM gives an individualized description to each player.
> He may show an overall diagram of the area. However, any
> of the changing conditions (i.e. moving combatants, etc.) are
> only described via GM verbal descriptions. This is what Kevin
> call "first-person" or "subjective" description.
Pretty much. The only change I would make to what you write here is
that I would delete "are only described via GM verbal descriptions."
I'm not committed here to pure verbal descriptions--just to providing
character level description, at least as much as possible.
> I have no problem believing that first-person description
>works and is preferred by some (or many) Immersive players.
>However, here I will continue with why I usually prefer
>option (1).
Thank you for this--I get the impression that some people think I'm
crazy to believe this, or alternatively that players who hold this
preference are defective (sorry Warren, I could not resist :)
> How would a first-person overhead diagram differ from a
>third-person overhead diagram? Would you really make four different
>drawings for the four players?
Sure--I can make a rough sketch pretty quickly--faster sometimes than
I can frame the verbal description. It does not have to be pretty--it
just has to communicate what the character perceives . . .
> 1) It slows down pacing significantly to have the GM successively
> reinterpret the same reality into multiple subjective
> perspectives.
>
> 2) In my experience, first-person descriptions more often lead to
> assumption clashes -- like a player thinks his character is
> standing beside a wall when the GM thinks he is out in the open.
> This is a regular feature of the first-person-description combats
> I have been in.
>
> I would guess that this is because with only one description,
> there is less chance for the GM to develop consistency mistakes.
> The more operations required of him, the more likely he is to
> make mistakes in his descriptions or in his internal modelling.
> It's like a game of Operator: the more often the GM repeats
> the process of describing what is going on, the more likely a
> mistake will creep in.
>
> Incidentally, I would presume that Kevin's combats do not
> have this feature -- I am curious as to how he avoids them.
Again--thank you. You are right, but not because I'm doing anything
special. Its mostly because, when I actually tried to run this way, I
ran fights that had very small numbers of PC participants.
Actually, that is not quite right. When I tried this approach last, I
organized it around the framework of character decision points. I
worked from the assumption that close combat is opportunistic (you
take what your opponent gives you) most of the time, and that decision
points usually occur at breaks in the action (the chief exception to
this is when a highly skilled fighter takes on a poorly skilled
one--in which case the highly skilled fighter has the opportunity to
make decisions during the fighting). Thus, I could compress a lot of
game time and activity into fairly brief descriptions. The downside
of this was that I had to be REALLY careful to keep track of the
passage of time. What this meant for the issue of continuity errors
was that I only had to describe changes in the situation during these
breaks, these points at which the PC could reassess the situation and
make decisions. In general, there just were not all that many of
these in any given combat.
> 3) Listening to the first-person descriptions to other players
> is distracting to me. I have a harder time firewalling
> emotional/subjective impressions than I do factual data.
> If the descriptions really reflect their true inner character,
> then it will be hard for me to shake that impression on
> an emotional-type level.
John--what follows is something of a cop out on my part--but I tried
to respond to this concern in my recent replies to Mary and Mark
elsewhere in the thread. Since the thread it still managably small,
may I presume to refer you there, so I don't have to repeat myself for
a third time :)
Smile. Now that you are back, do you think the approach I describe
there might work for you? I ask because I know for a fact that some
of my players share this concern of yours . . .
It seems to me that Mark's distinction between local and global
knowledge and subjective and objective knowledge is useful here.
Let's leave the objective/subjective aside for the moment, and just
look at the local/global distinction. If that was all we were
concerned with, would this still be a problem for you?
Thanks much . . .
Kevin
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 15 Sep 97 22:50:32 GMT, ma...@cs.anu.edu.au (Mark Grundy) wrote:
> I agree that this can tread on character perception toes, and that
> it's frustrating to players who already subjectivise. For myself, I
> like GMs to just give me the objective character experiences, and let me
> fill in the colour; otherwise it feels like role-cueing.
I just responded to Mary elsewhere in this thread. Mark frames the
issue better here than I did in my response.
> There seem to be two issues here, though:
>
> * Local knowledge versus global knowledge
> * Subjective information versus objective information
Yes--I think this is so.
I want wherever possible to emphasize the local knowledge over the
global, at least where that is appropriate from the POV of the
character.
The second distinction is also valid, but I find it more slippery too.
In my reply to Mary I introdoced a thought experiment--two characters
look at a burning building. The POV (local knowledge) is the same;
the characters' training and expertise, however, is different. One is
an average guy, with no special training; the other is a professional
fire-fighter with years of practical experience. They both SEE the
same thing, but they will surely PERCEIVE it differently. The
difference lies in the ability of the one character to INTERPRET what
he sees more precisely than the other. Is this greater interpretive
facility "objective" or "subjective?"
Now Mary added a third possibilty. Let's add in to this situation a
predisposition on the part of the professional firefighter to err on
the side of caution--perhaps that is why he has the benefit of those
years of experience :)
In the approach I am striving to work out, I think I should take into
account the different skill levels of the two characters--but I also
think I should leave it to the player of the firefighter to decide how
to role play the disposition of the character to be cautious. So
there should be limits on my taking into account what I know about the
character when I provide descriptions.
Does this make sense? And do you think this is a tenable position to
strive for?
Thanks!
Kevin
Mark Grundy
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net writes:
| In my reply to Mary I introdoced a thought experiment--two characters
| look at a burning building. The POV (local knowledge) is the same;
| the characters' training and expertise, however, is different. One is
| an average guy, with no special training; the other is a professional
| fire-fighter with years of practical experience. They both SEE the
| same thing, but they will surely PERCEIVE it differently. The
| difference lies in the ability of the one character to INTERPRET what
| he sees more precisely than the other. Is this greater interpretive
| facility "objective" or "subjective?"
[...]
| In the approach I am striving to work out, I think I should take into
| account the different skill levels of the two characters--but I also
| think I should leave it to the player of the firefighter to decide how
| to role play the disposition of the character to be cautious. So
| there should be limits on my taking into account what I know about the
| character when I provide descriptions.
| Does this make sense? And do you think this is a tenable position to
| strive for?
Kevin, there surely is some slippery stuff hiding in the
subjective/objective issue. It's plausible even to claim that our
descriptions to players can't *help* but involve some level of character
interpretation. Even the most factual a description can be subjective,
just as a photograph can be subjective. The choices of picture edges
and zoom-in/zoom-out detail alone introduce subjectivity.
So if we can't be perfectly objective can we at least manage the
benefits and risks of subjectivity effectively? I think that we can.
Here are what I think are the benefits and costs of more or less
subjective narrative:
More subjective: the GM uses world and character knowledge to help the
player develop a better internal character narrative, and foster a
deeper appreciation of the character's interaction with the world in
both the player and the group. But this is accomplished at the risk
of clashing with the player's character conception, distorting the
information conveyed to the player, or overriding the player's own
ideas.
Less subjective: the GM provides reliable narrative that's presumed to be
relevant to the player's interests and the character's perceptions,
but makes no undertaking that this information is either relevant or
complete. The player is free to shade or colour this information in
the internal character narrative. But this is accomplished at the
risk of losing opportunities to draw on the GM's vision for the
character and world, and sharing character narrative with the group.
I'm not going to compare the benefits of each approach, because it's
really up to playgroups to explore these themselves. I would like to
make some comments on managing subjectivity risk though.
As a player, I'm happy to hear `your character sees/hears/
smells/touches/tastes...' But I start getting concerned when a GM tells
me: `your character thinks/feels like', because it feels like
play-cuing, and breaks the show-don't-tell principle. So as a GM I try
and avoid it if I can. But I also have world background that the
players don't, so I don't like to withhold GM insights that might be of
use to the player. So in conveying my suggestions and interpretations,
I often try to express them in third party terms, or by asking a
question. This is intended to help leave the player some convenient
back-out space, while still conveying the basic idea For example:
``A hundred years ago, a famous tactician of this world wrote:...''
[The character is free to believe this tactician or not]
``The sky is black and threatening, and the horses nicker in disquiet.''
[Is the nickering related to the weather, or something else? This is a
character decision]
``His face is unlined, cherubic. Could this possibly be the face of your
sister's killer?''
[Kind of unsubtle, but it works okay for some kinds of players.]
So, with such techniques, you can still convey character/world
insight more or less subtly, and it may be less of a bother for players
who like interpretative autonomy. Leastways, I appreciate such
techniques when GMs use them for me.
But there are also players who'll ask outright: ``Do I think the
tactician is right? Do the horses seem unusually scared? Does my
psychology tell me he could have a killer's personality?'' For such
players I still try and present them with informed choices rather than
outright decisions, but I suspect at times they'd much rather just hear
a direct, unambiguous answer.
-----
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Tue, 16 Sep 1997 03:48:23 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
>I'm not really looking for people to tell me whether this approach is
>*theoretically* viable or not--nor am I looking for people to chime in
>"this works for me" or "this does not work for me." What I'm looking
>for is help working through this approach, given that it is what my
>players seem to want. I want to find some way to satisfy the
>preferences of the particular group of people for whom I am planning
>to run.
I realized after I had posted this that this might be read as an
implicit critique of Mary, which is not at all what I intend. Mary
frames her comments in an admirable way, I think--she often begins
with a general comment, and then shows how she arrived at her position
by talking about her own specific experiences. I find this approach
to rgfa conversation very useful.
So a post that starts with "were I one of your players, here's what I
would find troubling in what you describe" is in fact quite useful to
me. "For my purposes your approach sucks eggs," is less so. The one
way of framing the post aims at dealing with a pragmatic problem--the
other generalizes from that problem to condemn the whole exercise out
of hand. I'm less interested in defending the viability of the
exercise, and much more interested in identifying the specific
problems that might crop up and trying to work out ways to mitigate
them.
None of which should be read as a critique of Mary's post. Quite the
contrary, as with almost everything else she writes, I found it useful
and constructive.
Best,
Kevin
John H Kim
This is another reply to Kevin concerning "subjective"
versus "objective" GM descriptions. The difference here appears
to be a very fine line. Before I was concerned about gross
effects like having movable counters to represent combatants
on the diagram.
However, we are getting into much more subtle distinctions.
Kevin's example of "subjective perception" of a burning building
amounts to the same as I would do with "objective perception" plus
"skill use" -- i.e. I would give a general description of what is
seen to all characters, and then I give specific information only
to the firefighter based on his skill.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Kevin Hardwick <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
>I have not experimented much with the subjective approach to combat
>either, save at the very end of the Bevon game--which is why I bring it
>up here. The trouble I'm facing is that some of my players find the
>standard approach to combat--which is what I've been using up to now--
>distracting and intrusive and destructive of their ability to be IC.
Hmmm. I might not be the best one to ask here, since I
suspect my preferences are different than your players. I think
one of their concern's is that although they try, they find it hard
to ignore Out-of-Character (OOC) tactical information.
I think this goes beyond how descriptions are framed to them.
Let's say the PC's are retreating into a tunnel, and while others
are fighting, the first PC jumps down. Suddenly you as GM inform
him that he is grabbed and muffled by some creature. The other
players find it distracting to know this when their PC's do not.
(Note: this specific case can be addressed in a number of ways,
but it is an example to highlight the effect.)
The problem is that as long as the players are all in the
same room, each player is going to get the Out-of-Character (OOC)
information given to other players.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
I think a useful thing here is to have less deadly combats.
I find that a major element of this problem is the _player_ fear
of losing a character. It is hard to ignore tactical information
when using it could save your PC. In non-deadly combats, players
generally find it easier to willingly ignore this information -- to
intentionally make the mistakes their characters would.
This to me is one of the joys of role-playing: to act through
ways of thinking which I the player consider wrong. I prefer to
have some of this OOC info for this. As an example, I was in a
post-holocaust _GURPS Fantasy_ game where our primitive characters
encountered high-tech artifacts. The GM described these mostly in
vague ways so that the players wouldn't recognize them. However,
I found it much more enjoyable to recognize and thus visualize them
as a player -- and then have my character Philip interpret them in
bizarre ways.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
To get back to the issue of combat, perhaps you could try
to change the tone of the combat rather than how you convey PC
perceptions. The combats ideally should have more opportunities for
In-Character expression and mistakes -- and on the other hand,
fewer player-based goals (i.e. keep my character alive, figure
out this mystery, etc.).
An example might be a duel to first blood with an NPC or
three whom the PC's are getting to know or possible respect.
Who wins is not so important as *how* they win. This personal
aspect of combat is one of the reasons I enjoyed superhero combat
for so long -- the fights were full of character, as opposed to
being tactical exercises.
You can slowly introduce deadly force back into combats,
but take some care. I now think that the *players* should be warned
about this even if the characters are unaware... Threat to the lives
of the PC's is a touchy emotional issue for most players.
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
I'm not really looking for people to tell me whether
this approach is *theoretically* viable or not--nor
am I looking for people to chime in "this works for
me" or "this does not work for me." What I'm looking
for is help working through this approach, given that
it is what my players seem to want....
Warren's suggestion that I find new players is not
an option--I LIKE these people; I run the game in
part to stay in contact with them.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your question as a theoretical one, and gave an
answer for the benefit and amusement of the lurking audience. I would have
been less flip had I realized this was an issue that you yourself were
actually facing.
That said, can you say again what approach you want to discuss? The
questions I remember run something along the lines of, 'how does Brian
Gleichman make his approach work'. Is this still what you are looking for,
or is it something different? Put another way, are you looking for a way
to make an approach similar to what Brian or I use work for your players,
or are you looking for a way to make the approach you use work for players
like Brian's and mine?
I will say that I don't find your description of your current approach to
be particularly 'subjective', despite it's being what I will call 'first
person', being from the viewpoint of the character. The only grey area is
filtering for character skills - in your example, giving an experienced
firefighter additional information about an ongoing fire. I will mention
that I myself filter for character skills - whether or not I put a trail
down on the table depends on whether any of the characters have the
appropriate skills to discern it.
To avoid filtering for personality or other areas that players tend to
feel ownership over, I find that it helps to have a well defined skill
system, and for the gamesmaster to keep track of the characters' skills
separately from the players. I keep a 3x5 index card for each player
character that provides the character's skills and characteristics. That
way, the players don't have to know when I am checking for a skill, and I
can more easily limit my filtering sticking to defined skills.
In examples like your firefighter example, I do tend to use a shared
description plus individual elaborations, rather than a separate
description for each character. For example, I say 'you see flames leaping
from the third story window' to all the players, then elaborate with 'Joe
Firefighter believes that the fire has reached the point that it won't be
possible to douse them before the building burns down'. I do this to save
time; I'd be curious as to whether John Kim would find the elaborations
easier or more difficult to firewall than completely separate descriptions.
I get the impression that some people think I'm
crazy to believe this, or alternatively that players
who hold this preference are defective (sorry Warren,
I could not resist :)
Not defective, just unlike my own players and outside my experience.
Though now that I realize you are not filtering for character personality,
it makes a lot more sense to me.
Sure--I can make a rough sketch pretty quickly--faster
sometimes than I can frame the verbal description. It
does not have to be pretty--it just has to communicate
what the character perceives . . .
I recommend against this approach. Especially for a combat situation,
you'll have a lot of movement and a lot of sketches. While the initial
verbal descriptions may be longer, the overall scene will be less drawn
out, because you can describe changes - 'now that you've moved, you can see
that there are no enemy soldiers behind the wall'. With first person
sketches, you have to redraw the other stuff the character sees from a new
perspective each time.
In addition, rough sketches necessarily omit 'irrelevant' details - and
there can major differences of opinion between gamesmaster and player as to
what is 'relevant'.
Warren Dew
Keran
On Tue, 16 Sep 1997 03:59:17 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
>On 15 Sep 97 22:50:32 GMT, ma...@cs.anu.edu.au (Mark Grundy) wrote:
>
<snip>
>
>> There seem to be two issues here, though:
>>
>> * Local knowledge versus global knowledge
>> * Subjective information versus objective information
>
>Yes--I think this is so.
>
>I want wherever possible to emphasize the local knowledge over the
>global, at least where that is appropriate from the POV of the
>character.
>
>The second distinction is also valid, but I find it more slippery too.
>
>In my reply to Mary I introdoced a thought experiment--two characters
>look at a burning building. The POV (local knowledge) is the same;
>the characters' training and expertise, however, is different. One is
>an average guy, with no special training; the other is a professional
>fire-fighter with years of practical experience. They both SEE the
>same thing, but they will surely PERCEIVE it differently. The
>difference lies in the ability of the one character to INTERPRET what
>he sees more precisely than the other. Is this greater interpretive
>facility "objective" or "subjective?"
I don't know, but I do this sort of thing all the time; not doing it
would strike me as making less information available to the character
in play than he'd really have.
>Now Mary added a third possibilty. Let's add in to this situation a
>predisposition on the part of the professional firefighter to err on
>the side of caution--perhaps that is why he has the benefit of those
>years of experience :)
>
>In the approach I am striving to work out, I think I should take into
>account the different skill levels of the two characters--but I also
>think I should leave it to the player of the firefighter to decide how
>to role play the disposition of the character to be cautious. So
>there should be limits on my taking into account what I know about the
>character when I provide descriptions.
>
>Does this make sense? And do you think this is a tenable position to
>strive for?
It seems perfectly reasonable to me and more or less describes the
way I run.
Keran
On Tue, 16 Sep 1997 04:21:47 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
>On 15 Sep 1997 19:55:22 GMT, jh...@sawasdee.cc.columbia.edu (John H
>Kim) wrote:
>
<snip>
>
>> How would a first-person overhead diagram differ from a
>>third-person overhead diagram? Would you really make four different
>>drawings for the four players?
>
>Sure--I can make a rough sketch pretty quickly--faster sometimes than
>I can frame the verbal description. It does not have to be pretty--it
>just has to communicate what the character perceives . . .
Er. Caveat. You don't have to sketch in the details, but if you,
yourself, do not have an excellent grasp of perspective, there's room
for all sorts of nasty miscommunication about relative positions and
sizes. It'd be easy to introduce inconsistencies and distortions into
the sketches presented to different characters, especially if you
don't have an overhead to check it against. There's all kinds of
room for screwups here that an overhead usually eliminates
naturally, e.g.: you think character A is 10 ft. to character B's
left, player A thinks it's 5 ft., and player B thinks it's 15 ft. The
advantage of the overhead is that it gives everyone the common
frame of reference provided by physical reality in the real world.
I'm having a horrible time phrasing the rest of this so it's clear,
but I think it's important, so I'm going to try anyway.
I may *add* information from an individual or subjective perspective--
take your firefighter example--where one character has knowledge
that should also provide an interpretation of a cluster of data I
may not have the time or knowledge to describe myself. I do not,
however, ever willingly *subtract* the common frame of reference
from the information available to the players and to me.
The gameworld is not a physical dimensional construct, but we're
attempting to use it as a simulation of one. There must be something
in the game that *stands in* for common physical dimensionality,
something that serves the same function. In the real world, I know
that I'm about 15' from my dog because that reality is communicated
to me by my senses. My judgement of the distance is inexact; this
does not make the distance inexact. My description--which would
substitute for the senses in a game--is far more inexact.
I could tell you that the dog is an Akita with a black muzzle, white
feet, white tail tip and undersides, a white patch on his neck, is
mostly a greyish tan produced by multicolored guard hairs that
are partly black and partly light brown, looks like a very large
German shepherd with a short bearish face and a tail curled up
like a husky's, and is lying in a large blueish-green rectangle of
cloth stretched out over a 5' x 3' x 1' framework of white metal pipe
filling most of the center of the room (this contraption is an
extra-large dog hammock). I could write a much longer description
and you still wouldn't come close to having the same amount of
information about the dog I can gather by sight and hearing alone.
There is no such thing as a player who has *more* information about
his character's physical surroundings than the character would if he
were occupying a physical reality, unless the character be without
the normal complement of senses. I could tell you something about the
dog that I cannot discover from my current position by sight or
hearing--that the dog weighs 143 lbs.--and you still don't more
about the dog than you would if you were gathering your information
by sense instead of description. You know very much less, with one
datum you couldn't acquire that precisely by direct use of your eyes.
I could add a dozen pieces of information about the dog you couldn't
discern by sense from my chair, and your position would still be
information starvation, not information surfeit.
That wouldn't change even if I could send you a quick sketch of the
dog.
The problem before the gamemaster is not to tell the players exactly
what their characters perceive: that cannot be done. It's to convey
information to the players so as to give them the illusion that their
characters are occupying a physical reality. The characters are
psychological entities and it's certainly true that they will filter
their perceptions in order to interpret them, but GM whose method
of presentation treats the characters primarily as psychological
entities and omits presentation of the objective physical model of
the world on the grounds that it's realistic to do so runs a high
risk of breaking the illusion instead of enhancing it, because
physical reality then is presented in *no* channel.
All the psychological potential for misconstruction of physical sense
impressions is also present in the potential for misconstruction
of the GM's description, amplified by the comparative vagueness of
description as compared to senses; if the GM attempts to add
misleading, ambiguous, or bogus information to the mix, or to omit
relevant information in an attempt to mimic such psychological
misconstruction, he risks having at least *three* different layers of
misconstruction where the character would be presented at most with
one. The character might misinterpret the raw data presented by his
senses, if he were a real physical being. However, he would not have
to deal with a player's mistaken visualization of a description where
information available to the character's senses is missing, he would
not have to deal with mistaken impressions caused by the *player's*
interpretation of what the GM's intentionally ambiguous and misleading
description means (there is no reason to suppose that the player will
twist it in precisely the way the GM imagines he will), and he would
not have to deal with the GM's inevitable failure to completely
understand his mindset and thus to incorrectly foresee exactly how
the character would misconstrue the evidence of his senses. The
result of this kind of misinformation is often not to convey the
impression that the world is consistent and the characters are
confused, but that the world is inconsistent--see Phil's post for
an example.
For this reason, when I add individual or subjective elements to a
description, I usually try to make sure that it's additional
information, rather than having it displace or subtract from local
objective information. It seems to me that the risk of creating
inconsistency owing to information starvation and breaking the
illusion of reality commonly outweighs the benefits of any
subtraction of information.
I must confess that I haven't solved this problem to my complete
satisfaction in my own games, however. I run online, and I only
get to use diagrams if they're prepared and uploaded ahead of
time; I can't produce them on the spot in play. As a result, I often
find my own ability to represent positional information accurately
and quickly inadequate. My games would probably have a stronger
simulationist and tactical flavor if I could employ improvised
diagrams; the inability to do so has pushed my campaigns in a
stronger dramatist direction than I might take face to face because
story isn't hindered by the ability to employ only words. Indeed,
I think the exclusion of nonverbal elements often strengthens it.
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 16 Sep 1997 16:20:32 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>Sorry, I misinterpreted your question as a theoretical one, and gave an
>answer for the benefit and amusement of the lurking audience. I would have
>been less flip had I realized this was an issue that you yourself were
>actually facing.
Gosh no, Warren--no apology necessary :) I wrote back partially in a
spirit of teasing you a bit, which I realized afterwards could easily
enough be misconstrued. But that's really a measure of the degree to
which I feel comfortable discussing things with you, so please take
that as a compliment . . .
At any rate, what I am looking for is help working through running
combats for this particular group of players. Both yours and John's
comments on this have been really helpful. Thank you!
It does occur to me that we may very well adopt positions here on rgfa
that are more firm than what we might take in real life. I have no
doubt at all in my mind that I could run a game for, say, Scott
Ruggles, and probably for you too, which you would enjoy, provided
that I was clear enough what I was trying to do at the outset. And
I'd bet that you would enjoy it even though it isn't really the style
of game you most prefer. I say that with confidence about you and
Scott (and I could easily enough add others) because I've read enough
of your prose to suspect strongly that were we to meet in person, I
would enjoy your company . . .
Best,
Kevin
John H Kim
A quick answer to Warren on the question of firewalling
descriptions given to other characters. I had mentioned for myself
as a player that I have an easier time firewalling factual information
than emotional/subjective impressions... For In-Character (IC) play,
I prefer not to here emotionally-loaded stuff about other PC's --
such as learning abou their personality from GM descriptions.
Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
>In examples like your firefighter example, I do tend to use a shared
>description plus individual elaborations, rather than a separate
>description for each character. For example, I say 'you see flames
>leaping from the third story window' to all the players, then elaborate
>with 'Joe Firefighter believes that the fire has reached the point that
>it won't be possible to douse them before the building burns down'. I
>do this to save time; I'd be curious as to whether John Kim would find
>the elaborations easier or more difficult to firewall than completely
>separate descriptions.
Personally I don't see a real difference to my play, unless
maybe the separate descriptions slowed things down enough that I was
driven to distraction. This case seems mostly factual, which I
generally don't have a problem with.
The cases I dislike would be more like, say, realizing that
another PC is in love with my PC because of a GM description to the
other player.
-*-*-*-
OTOH, I think Kevin's players are having a problem with
firewalling factual info about tactics in combat. Not that they
are intentionally breaking the firewall, but rather that dealing
with it is interfering with their play. This is not usually a
problem with me.
A Lapalme
John H Kim (jh...@sawasdee.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> 3) Listening to the first-person descriptions to other players
> is distracting to me. I have a harder time firewalling
> emotional/subjective impressions than I do factual data.
> If the descriptions really reflect their true inner character,
> then it will be hard for me to shake that impression on
> an emotional-type level.
>
> 4) This method seems like it would make it more difficult for
> PC's to change under stress (because then the GM won't know
> how to tailor their descriptions). I have had this happen many
> times in third-person description games: my character reacts
> differently under stress than is expected by either the GM or
> even me. Then I have to drop OOC to describe this change to
> the GM or be forced to wade through presumably inappropriate
> descriptions.
>
hmm... I get the impression that what some of us mean by subjective is not
all the same. When I say subjective, I mean from the POV of the
character. When I provide these descriptions, I do _not_ provide
emotional descriptions; that's up to the player/character.
So, having said that, I'm not clear on how PC changes due to stress will
make a GM description inappropriate.
A Lapalme
Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
>
> There is no such thing as a player who has *more* information about
> his character's physical surroundings than the character would if he
> were occupying a physical reality, unless the character be without
> the normal complement of senses.
I don't thyink anyone is arguing that. It's not a question of quantity
but of what the information is. Some information should not be
communicated to the player, some should.
>I could tell you something about the
> dog that I cannot discover from my current position by sight or
> hearing--that the dog weighs 143 lbs.--and you still don't more
> about the dog than you would if you were gathering your information
> by sense instead of description. You know very much less, with one
> datum you couldn't acquire that precisely by direct use of your eyes.
> I could add a dozen pieces of information about the dog you couldn't
> discern by sense from my chair, and your position would still be
> information starvation, not information surfeit.
>
Actually, that depends on the player. If you give me a bunch of
information, as in the example above, I would consider that I am
receiving, not only too much information, but also innapropriate information.
> The problem before the gamemaster is not to tell the players exactly
> what their characters perceive: that cannot be done. It's to convey
> information to the players so as to give them the illusion that their
> characters are occupying a physical reality. The characters are
> psychological entities and it's certainly true that they will filter
> their perceptions in order to interpret them, but GM whose method
> of presentation treats the characters primarily as psychological
> entities and omits presentation of the objective physical model of
> the world on the grounds that it's realistic to do so runs a high
> risk of breaking the illusion instead of enhancing it, because
> physical reality then is presented in *no* channel.
Maybe...
[major snip]
> illusion of reality commonly outweighs the benefits of any
> subtraction of information.
>
The situation we are dealing with is how people internalize OOC
information (because, when it comes down to it, all the information is
recieved OOC, irrelevant of the POV the information is supposed to
represent).
I won't argue your point that there is no way a player can have more
information that then character. However, I will say that the information
the character receives may not be as useful to the character as the
information the player recieves. In a combat situation, a tactical
overview of
the situation, with exact distances (if one is using any type of objective
ground scale) is critical information to the character. However, this
information (assuming a case where no one can fly) is something the
character cannot/should not have. If the player receives this
information, then either the player uses it, consciously or not, or
actively tries to internalize it in a way which is consistent with the
character's perspective. Now, if the player uses it, I consider that the
value of this information is so high that it becomes irrelevant that the
character sees more. In other words, it's not how much you see but the
value of what you see.
Now, going back to internalizing OOC informatin:
My personal experience with "objective" descriptions is that they convey
way to much valuable information. As a player I'm then stuck either
having to use or trying to internalize it. Using it usually offends my
sensibilities since I don't consider it fair. Internalizing it is a real
chore and forces me to actively try to make an OOC object into an IC
object. Usually, that pulls me out of character.
OTOH, a personal description, keyed to the character's perspective is
something I can internalize very easily. I'm willing to accept the chance
of critical information not making it across. I've also found that, like
any other method, it doesn't work well the first few times one tries it
but, after some time, the communication cues between GM and player get
ironed out and the number of assumption clashes usually drops to an
acceptable level.
My experience, when using that approach, which I've been doing for over 3
years now, is that the number of assumption clashes did not increase at
all (I'm discountingng the first couple of sessions since the whole group
was aware of the experiment and we were actively working on it so that it
would work). The type of clashes did change, though.
Finally, I also think this method is better suited for games where
tactical situations are not common fare.
William Clifford
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net wrote:
>As an example, while most of my players can firewall information to an
>extent, there is a limit to their ability to do so. Thus, in a recent
>game the PCs held a series of breachs in a wall during an attack on a
>city. Despite the success of the center group of PCs, the two
>flanking groups were forced back, and the center group then retreated
>too. Afterwards the players commented on the action. The center
>group players noted that while their decision to retreat could be
>rationalized, they weren't certain they would have made that decision
>if they had not also known about failure of the two flanking groups to
>hold their position. Maybe they would have--but maybe not too. And
>more important, none of them felt that they could see the action as
>their characters would have seen it--because the players had too much
>strategic information, which could not help but color their tactical
>decisions.
>Now I know how to deal with this problem in a mechanicless diceless or
>semi-diceless game. But how might one deal with this problem in a
>more mechanical fashion?
I guess I'm not sure what you are asking for here. You want rules for
firewalling out-of-character information? Why wouldn't you handle it
the same way as in the other kinds of games. The only time I use any
kind of mechanics at all is in combat and other "interesting"
situations. I can't see how I would change the presentation of
information if I did it diceless.
First person is my preferred veiw as a player. As a GM I stick to
second person descriptions. I try not to give out-of-character or
omniscient information except when I perceive that a little dramatic
irony will spice things up. The trick is keeping the line between
limited and omnicient veiws separate and obvious as you play.
During combats I stick to single character limited veiw each time
initiative comes around or when something "interesting" happens to an
individual PC while waiting for their initiative turn. The rules in my
homebrew are designed precisely for this kind of presentation.
I've not had opportunity enough to find all the problems but the worst
one I had was not of firewalling out-of-character info (although I
have had that one) but of me skipping people causing them to feel left
out of the action. In other words they wer complaining because not
enough things were happening to their character!
I'm an immersive player. I'm an immesive GM. For many combats a hex
grid comes out so that everyone can see where they are. But there is
nothing to prevent me from making the fight personally felt by all of
the players. There's nothing in the rules that says I can't draw their
attention away from the grid and the lego figurines and bringing the
battle to life in the players' imaginations. That is, after all, where
the game is really taking place.
-William Clifford
from feilds foiled! (you figure it out)
Keran
On 17 Sep 1997 03:52:33 GMT, ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme)
wrote:
>
>Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
>>
>> There is no such thing as a player who has *more* information about
>> his character's physical surroundings than the character would if he
>> were occupying a physical reality, unless the character be without
>> the normal complement of senses.
>
>I don't thyink anyone is arguing that. It's not a question of quantity
>but of what the information is. Some information should not be
>communicated to the player, some should.
I'm operating under the impression that the point of the discussion
is not how firewalling works for different players per se, though I
grant that that's relevant, but how to create a simulation of the
character's individual experience that's convincing to the player.
I do not assume that the same techniques will prove equally
satisfactory to all players.
I do find quantity to be an issue. To paint it in very broad
brush strokes, the large quantity of sensory data the players
don't get that the characters would is at least as important
to me as the information that the players get that the characters
wouldn't.
For the purposes of this discussion, I consider the information's
value as something on which to base decisions in combat
secondary: this thread started in the context of a conversation
about simulating the personal experience of combat as opposed
to modeling the results of combat. They're related subjects,
certainly, but not identical approaches.
>
>Maybe...
>
>[major snip]
>> illusion of reality commonly outweighs the benefits of any
>> subtraction of information.
>>
>The situation we are dealing with is how people internalize OOC
>information (because, when it comes down to it, all the information is
>recieved OOC, irrelevant of the POV the information is supposed to
>represent).
Er, actually, no. That wasn't what I was dealing with. I was
addressing potential conflicts between subjective psychological
distortions of characters' impressions of the scene, the objective
'reality' of the scene, and the difference in information delivery
paths between the gameworld and the real world which means
that you cannot expect identical results when manipulating
information. See Phil's post describing an example of an attempt
to provide psychological distortion and its effect on the
convincingness of the world model for context.
A Lapalme
Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
> On 17 Sep 1997 03:52:33 GMT, ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme)
> wrote:
>
>>
>>Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
>>>
>
> For the purposes of this discussion, I consider the information's
> value as something on which to base decisions in combat
> secondary: this thread started in the context of a conversation
> about simulating the personal experience of combat as opposed
> to modeling the results of combat. They're related subjects,
> certainly, but not identical approaches.
I'll agree with you tht the decision aspect is secondary since the
decision will be based on the perceptions of the characer. Therefore what
htese perceptions are becomes critical.
>>> illusion of reality commonly outweighs the benefits of any
>>> subtraction of information.
>>>
>>The situation we are dealing with is how people internalize OOC
>>information (because, when it comes down to it, all the information is
>>recieved OOC, irrelevant of the POV the information is supposed to
>>represent).
>
> Er, actually, no. That wasn't what I was dealing with. I was
> addressing potential conflicts between subjective psychological
> distortions of characters' impressions of the scene, the objective
> 'reality' of the scene, and the difference in information delivery
> paths between the gameworld and the real world which means
> that you cannot expect identical results when manipulating
> information.
Well sure. Depending on how one manipulates ifnormation, one will not get
the same result. that's the whole point of the manipulation.
The potential conflicts you refer to are, to me, directly related to how a
player internalizes OOC information. The same information provided by a
GM to two different players can be interprested totally
differently if the two players have a different mecahnism to hanlde OOC
information. My ability to internalize "objective" information is limited
and usually results in me firewalling too much info (ie I ignore stuff my
character might be privy to). This means that the GM will think I'm
operating on more info than I really am operating under. Which,
eventually will lead to assumption clashes.
eg:"objective description"
GM: "Hey how come you ignored that?"
Player: "Because my PC couldn't see it"
GM: "Uh? I figured that his high combat intuition would handle that"
Player: "Really? It just looked to me like that was pushing
intuition too far"
eg: "subjective description"
GM: "As you face your opponent, you have this itchy feeling at the
back of your neck"
Player choice one:
Player: "I look around, for a quick second, just to see..."
GM: "OK, you see some motion behind you. Meanwhile, your opponent
is taking advantage of your moment of distraction by ..."
Player choice two:
Player:"Well, whatever it is, I'll ignore. That guy in front of
me needs attention"
GM: "OK."
and gm goes on with description.
One could come up with a similar example which shows that the assumption
clash occurs in the subjective case.
My point:
How a player handles the OOC information is critical in the choice of
the presentation method of that information. It's not just of question of
limited bandwidth, it's also a queestion of signal to noise ratio. Too
much noise and you miss important signals. And, the problem is that one
person's noise is another person's signal.
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
>First person is my preferred veiw as a player. As a GM I stick to
>second person descriptions. I try not to give out-of-character or
>omniscient information except when I perceive that a little dramatic
>irony will spice things up. The trick is keeping the line between
>limited and omnicient veiws separate and obvious as you play.
>
>During combats I stick to single character limited veiw each time
>initiative comes around or when something "interesting" happens to an
>individual PC while waiting for their initiative turn. The rules in my
>homebrew are designed precisely for this kind of presentation.
Exactly--they question at stake here is how best to accomplish this.
For my players, some of the standard techniques which emphasize a
common perspective of the action for the sake of maintaining
consistency (and I suspect also for gamist reasons--rpgs, after all,
are a derivation way back when from war games). These techniques can
be problematic for some people. The question on the table is how best
to replace them, and with what.
Best,
Kevin
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 09:04:50 GMT, kera...@mail1.nai.net (Keran)
wrote:
>I'm operating under the impression that the point of the discussion
>is not how firewalling works for different players per se, though I
>grant that that's relevant, but how to create a simulation of the
>character's individual experience that's convincing to the player.
>I do not assume that the same techniques will prove equally
>satisfactory to all players.
Well, for me anyway these issues are strongly related. If certain
techniques produce problems for the player's ability to visualize the
situation as their character would see it (I'll stick with visual
metaphors here--I don't mean to exclude the other senses), then they
will produce a less effective of simulation, *for that player*. Your
point that different techniques are more, or less, satisfactory for
different players is well taken.
Anyway, as Alain explained elsewhere in this thread, third person
objective techniques can, for some people, provide too much of the
wrong kind of information, and this can be destructive of certain
kinds of role play. IME, players most likely to find third person
objective techniques problematic are those who most value the IC and
Immersive stances, but take that for what it is worth--YMM very easily
V.
A brief aside, Keran. We've been talking past each other a bit. I
don't provide 3D sketches to my players because I am not a
sufficiently good artist. What I do is to offer diagrammatic
sketches, mostly 2D, which represent not the objective reality per se,
but rather the reality that the character percieves.
For example, you are plaing a warrior type is in a melee, and your
character dispatches his opponent. (Decision point). A beefy
berserker fellow is bearing down on him from the front. My sketch
will emphasize the precise location of the berserker, since he is the
most prominent threat and the focus of your attention. I'll indicate
loosly "there is a group of people fighting off to your left which you
catch out of the corner of your eye" and then indicate the rough
position of that group on the sketch--but I don't show that in fact
there are five people over to the left, one of whom is your poor
Paladin, sadly beset by enemies.
Even when everyone in the room knows that the Paladin is taking it in
the teeth because he is so badly outnumbered, when I present the
information this way it stresses what the character knows with
precision and what he knows only sketchily, which my players have
found more conducive to being IC. It sort of serves as a reminder of
what is IC knowledge and what is OOC, if that makes sense.
Now obviously I have to make decisions as to what a character can
perceive well and what less so--but I can use whatever perception
mechanic we have agreed upon to do that, it seems to me.
>I do find quantity to be an issue. To paint it in very broad
>brush strokes, the large quantity of sensory data the players
>don't get that the characters would is at least as important
>to me as the information that the players get that the characters
>wouldn't.
Sure--I can see this. What techniques do you use to accomplish this?
Best,
Kevin
John H Kim
This is a clarification to Alain regarding my comparison
of first-person versus third-person descriptions. In general,
I think we are talking at odds because of the vagueness of what
is going on.
DIAGRAMS:
D1) Rough overhead map of the area (but not people): I think that
most people are agreed that this is a useful way of conveying
spatial relations that is difficult to verbalize or sketch.
D2) Ground-level POV sketches: This is good if done well, but
strongly limited by the GM's artistic ability. If done poorly
these can result in much confusion regarding perspective.
D3) Rough map with counters: This is a large-ish map placed
on the table with impromptu counters on it representing the
figures. This is not "objective" -- if an opponent is not
seen by the PC's, he will not be marked with a counter on
the map. Rather, the map is simply a way of conveying
spatial perceptions. Where verbally the GM might say,
GM: "The terrorist runs to behind the pillars?"
Player: "Wait -- where is that again? Did he just run
through Mack's field of fire, or did he run behind
the fountain here?"
D4) Scaled Battle-Map: This is usually used in conjunction with
hex-based mechanics, where objective movement, range, and
possibly facing are determined on the basis of the map.
Even so, unseen opponents or features are generally not
shown on the map.
VERBAL DESCRIPTION:
V1) Encapsulated Facts: The GM tries to briefly outline what is
happening where in a single description to all players. This
may include some qualifiers, such as "Those who are closest
can see that there are multiple bulges under the men's jackets."
Additional information may come from player questions or
GM elaboration.
GM: "OK, the terrorist sprints in a crouch for the pillars
on the far side of the fountain. Mack fires a burst just
as he dives behind cover."
"Mack, you think your burst went high."
"Jean?"
Player: "I jump at the sound and flatten back against the
door, and call out to Mack: `What the hell was that?' "
V2) Individualized Views: The GM may give general remarks, but
the bulk is described as individual POV descriptions. This
requires some repetition and interpretation on the GM's part.
For example,
GM: "OK, Mack, you see the terrorist run in front of the
fountain -- you line up a shot just as he is headed for
the pillars, but your burst goes high."
"Now Jean, you turn from guarding the corridor and see a
fleeting form run behind the fountain into the pillars.
There is a burst of gunfire flashing from Mack's position."
Player: "I spin towards the pillars and scan for a target."
V3) Subjective Views: Here the GM gives emotionally slanted or
leading descriptions to each player, to represent what the
PC apprehends (i.e. not just what she sees).
-*-*-*-
Note that in (V2), the GM takes more responsibility for where
the PC's attention is, among other things. In the more "factual"
approach, the player decides on the basis of the outlined scene
that his character didn't see anything. While in (V2) the GM
decides this for him. This is still true in (V1), however, as
the GM must decide what facts to give to the players as a whole.
That is, in (V1) the GM must decide what the PC's in general
see, and selectively decide on that. In (V2) this is multiplied in
that he must distinguish between each of the individual PC's.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
A Lapalme <ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>My ability to internalize "objective" information is limited and
>usually results in me firewalling too much info (ie I ignore stuff my
>character might be privy to). This means that the GM will think I'm
>operating on more info than I really am operating under. Which,
>eventually will lead to assumption clashes.
This sounds to me like a basic assumption clash, actually.
It seems like the GM is simply assuming to much -- that your
character perceives what he tells you the player. The choice of
how the description works is a matter of game contract -- i.e. who
is responsible for deciding on the character's perceptions.
-*-*-*-
>
>eg:"objective description"
> GM: "Hey how come you ignored that?"
> Player: "Because my PC couldn't see it"
> GM: "Uh? I figured that his high combat intuition would handle that"
> Player: "Really? It just looked to me like that was pushing
> intuition too far"
Hmm. Well, if you are going to play with objective
description, as a player you should probably verbalize what your
character sees/believes with action declaration. For example,
you could say, "Well, I didn't see that, so figuring the noise
to be from elsewhere, I charge."
-*-*-*-
>
>eg: "subjective description"
> GM: "As you face your opponent, you have this itchy feeling at the
> back of your neck"
>
>Player choice one:
> Player: "I look around, for a quick second, just to see..."
> GM: "OK, you see some motion behind you. Meanwhile, your opponent
> is taking advantage of your moment of distraction by ..."
>
>Player choice two:
> Player:"Well, whatever it is, I'll ignore. That guy in front of
> me needs attention"
> GM: "OK."
> and gm goes on with description.
This is a good example, and let me elaborate on what is going
on here. The GM here needs details of how the PC is acting and
somewhat more implicitly what his state is. He is assuming a
middle ground between [A] the PC being aware of his surroundings,
and [B] the PC being focussed on the enemy to the point that he
doesn't even feel what is behind him.
Further, tt is not at all clear to me how a player should
interpret this "itchy feeling". What does an "itchy feeling" mean
to my In-Character view? Did I see a shadow out of the corner of
my eye, or did I hear something?
This is not an pure perception, but rather description of
a feeling. For example, what *sort* of "itchy feeling" this is
can make a difference to how my character reacts to it. As an
example, an earlier PC of mine in the Ripper game began developing
paranoia. In my view, he pretty soon had very regular itchy
feelings on his neck...
This seems at odds with your example, where the GM
determines when my character has "itchy feelings" (and probably
uses that to indicate something actually behind him).
Keran
>Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
>>
>> There is no such thing as a player who has *more* information about
>> his character's physical surroundings than the character would if he
>> were occupying a physical reality, unless the character be without
>> the normal complement of senses.
>
>I don't thyink anyone is arguing that. It's not a question of quantity
>but of what the information is. Some information should not be
>communicated to the player, some should.
I'm going to try to clarify what I said; it impressed me as being
particularly murky while I was writing it.
>The situation we are dealing with is how people internalize OOC
>information (because, when it comes down to it, all the information is
>recieved OOC, irrelevant of the POV the information is supposed to
>represent).
>
>I won't argue your point that there is no way a player can have more
>information that then character.
In terms of the information that can be carried by the senses versus
that which can be conveyed by verbal description and diagram, the
point is indisputable. I do projections and animations of my
landscapes, among other things; one of my animations takes a
couple of minutes to run; it's what Keranset Island looks like if
you fly around it from a couple of thousand feet--more or less. The
animation is at 320 x 200, and occupies about 56M. It still falls
wildly short of being a true model of a first-person view of the
flight: the field of view is a small patch on the screen, not
everything I see; it doesn't currently include any sound; and there
is no kinesthetic information whatsoever in it. I could add sound
to it, but its other defects would take processing and storage
power several orders of magnitude beyond what I have available
to fix them, and the absence of kinesthetics would take a major
technical improvement besides.
This may not have anything to do with the point you're making,
but it was central to mine. If you tried to describe the same
scenes using verbal descriptions and diagrams with the intent
of conveying the same positional information, you might, if you
did a new sketch for every significant change of perspective,
perhaps the whole package might reach 100k (I'm assuming
the sketches are line drawings stored at the minimum size
and resolution to be clear), and you'd have lost unspeakable
amounts of information from the animation--which is itself very
information-poor compared to the real experience of flight.
In practice I can't imagine a GM's description of a flight around
the island being as detailed positionally as the aforesaid 100k
series of descriptions and sketches. I also don't think that
most GMs, pressed to come up with a description of a flight
around the island, would produce something similar to the
100k mess: it would be very time-consuming.
What are you trying to simulate? Is it the positional information
you can generate by flying around the island (objective
information) or do you want the player to have powerful
subjective impressions of what it feels like to fly around
the island? It's possible that there's a tradeoff here, given
that you have limited time and resources to generate the
descriptions, or you risk killing the pacing.
Does it matter if the player's visualization of the scene has
significant differences in positional construction from the
GM's and the other players'?
Now few objects that you perceive by sight come with
draftsman's dimensions on them. Notwithstanding this,
in most cases you do have a frame of reference and some
impression of the object's size and location. Your ability
to translate this into formal units so you can communicate
it with some accuracy may vary.
In a great many noncombat situations, you can safely
omit dimensions. An impressionistic description of a
'large' dragon tapestry in crimson and forest green on
the east wall will often serve--I may see it as 15' x 4' and
hung 6' off the floor, but I often won't add that; the players
may have visualizations of it that are inconsistent with
mine and each other's, but since the function of the
tapestry is to make the room seem real by adding
detail, it doesn't much matter as long as they all see it
in a believable way. The point here is that by not giving
dimensions I've not only resigned myself to inexactitude,
which is realistic, but to inconsistency of vision, which is
not.
> However, I will say that the information
>the character receives may not be as useful to the character as the
>information the player recieves. In a combat situation, a tactical
>overview of
>the situation, with exact distances (if one is using any type of objective
>ground scale) is critical information to the character. However, this
>information (assuming a case where no one can fly) is something the
>character cannot/should not have.
In the sense that the character usually doesn't know that the enemy's
exact distance in inches, I might agree with this; but if the
character can see the enemy at all, he has *some* impression of the
range and scale of what he's looking at. You have a few of choices
of format for the information--verbal, overhead, ground view--and
about five choices for accuracy:
1) You can fail to describe size and range in any meaningful manner,
as in the tapestry example above, inviting inconsistency into the
simulation. If the player visualizes at all, he'll have to do so in an
impressionistic manner.
2) You can describe it with more accuracy than is useful, necessary,
or likely for the character to have in context ("The man-at-arms is
124.7 yards away"). I've never done this verbally or tactically, but I
certainly have done it graphically for strategic information. My web
page, for example, has an overhead projection map of Keranset Island
with a scale on it. In point of fact, none of the uneducated
characters know what the island looks like from overhead, and their
impressions of how large it is will largely be formed by having
counted milestones walking along its roads, if they're landsmen.
The map exists because I expect the players to have some
ability to figure out what the landscape looks like from the places
their characters do know using it, e.g., if you look eastward from
Kell you can see a couple of fairly large islands across the sound.
3) You can describe it with varying degrees of roughness using
objective units ("The man-at-arms is around 120 yards away"),
or by reference to familiar distances or objects ("A bit bigger
than a cat"). I do this a lot.
4) You can describe it more interpretively, in context, according
to what the player may be proposing to do about it ("The man-at-
arms is well within range of a volley of arrows; as an aimed shot
it's not trivial, but within the range of a good longbowmen; it's a
reach but not impossible for a shortbow"). This may be more desirable
than giving objective distances if the player doesn't know as much
about what the objective distances mean as the character does (or if
the GM doesn't know either, sometimes.) I do a fair amount of
this, too.The problem with it is that if the player doesn't have any
idea what the range of a bow is, it may be difficult for him to
visualize the scene unless you also give it in more familiar units.
Somewhat as an aside, a lot of my social modelling is based
on medieval society, and even official documents are replete with
the use of units like this. A 'bowshot' is a mild example: to the
exasperation of historians, they find themselves confronted
with assessments of who owes what military service based on
how many 'hides' of land are owned, only to discover that a
hide is defined as the amount of land necessary to support
a family. How large is the family and how productive is the land?
The size of a hide may vary by at least a factor of two, depending
on where it's measured.
5) You can describe it misleadingly. I daresay I've managed to
give misleading descriptions unintentionally legions of times,
but I've never done it deliberately. But Phil described an attempt
to simulate subjective disorientation and distortion by giving a
description that mislead by omission and ambiguity, so:
On Tue, 16 Sep 1997 04:07:26 GMT, P.K...@latrobe.edu.au (Phil Keast)
wrote:
<snip>
>
>I tried in one particular campaign to implement a "first-person"
>filter. Having at the time recently completed a degree in Psychology I
>became concerned that characters/players tended to be presented with
>far more accurate and comprehensive information than occurs in "real
>life". Accordingly I provided the information that would reasonably be
>automatically noticed or perceived by the characters. The result was a
>disaster that almost never made it to the second session. The plaers
>were extremely upset when, in a stressful situation, they told me what
>their characters were attempt and I pointed out that the situation, on
>closer examination, was not what they thought. Even though my original
>descriptions of the situation were accurate, albeit ambiguous and
>incomplete, the players insisted that I must have changed the layout
>or somehow confused myself. The possibility that the characters, who
>arrived during a snowstorm under the influence of a summoning, didn't
>know the relative positions of the doors of each of the buildings on
>the farmstead was, to them, unbelievable.
<snip>
I doubt I'd try this, and the reason I wouldn't try it is that, while
perception of raw sensory data and interpretation of them are
inseparably linked in the human psyche, they are still not identical.
There's an extent to which not even elements of descriptions that
we think of as objective are noninterpretive: when I describe
something as a 'door' I'm supplying something to the players
besides raw data about an aperture--I'm also communicating
assumptions about its probable size, regularity of shape,
placement, and function, such that if any of the expected
assumptions are not true, I should usually note them. It
would be perfectly possible to find a door opening from a tower
20' into the air onto a sheer drop, but if I don't tell you anything
about the drop you're almost certain to picture it at ground level
or supply it with stairs, because you've made assumptions about
its function.
In fact, most real life errors of perception are errors of
interpretation. This is where games differ from real life: in
real life, my misinterpretation of raw sensory data--say, I misjudge
the distance to something--doesn't change the actual pattern
of light reflected from the object impinging on my retina. My
interpretation of the scene is constructive, but my vision of
it is not: if I fail to correctly understand the spatial relationship
between me and the chair across the room, it still won't change
my vision of the chair.
In the game, there is no sensory channel delivering raw data from
the scene: both data and interpretation are conflated in the GM's
descriptions (in whatever format they're given.) The player's view of
the scene is also constructive. In other words, any attempt by the GM
to induce interpretive error into the scene--which does happen in the
real world--has a very high probability of inducing error into the
player's visualization of the scene at the same time, in a way that
doesn't happen in the real world. There is a tension in the game
that doesn't occur in real life between the ability to present a point
of view with subjective distortion, and the need to maintain a
consistent model of world.
I consider not only the quantity of information available material,
but its delivery method as well, therefore.
> If the player receives this
>information, then either the player uses it, consciously or not, or
>actively tries to internalize it in a way which is consistent with the
>character's perspective. Now, if the player uses it, I consider that the
>value of this information is so high that it becomes irrelevant that the
>character sees more. In other words, it's not how much you see but the
>value of what you see.
I have very little trouble with this, myself. When I happen to playing
in a gamist mode, where player and character goals are united, then
I don't want valuable information the character couldn't have; but
I'm rarely doing this in an RPG. The usual contaminant in my
simulations is story, and for story purposes I want more information
than the character could have, because I like to watch things I'm
not involved in, in audience stance. I have pretty seamless
transitions between author, audience, and immersive stances and don't
find those a problem; those that I find jarring are actor and
OOC-trying-to-figure-out-what-the-blazes-is-really-going-on..
Kevin asked about simulating combat from a first-person perspective,
however, so I've been answering as if my sole purpose were to try
to reproduce the character's experience. Not inducing alterations
in the simulation by providing the wrong information is only one part
of this goal; to attempt to produce the illusion that the character
is occupying a real landscape in a real world is another, and to the
latter end I cannot agree that the quantity of information delivered
is immaterial and its tactical value is paramount. I find it most
important that it convey the impression of a solid world, whether
it has any tactical value or not.
>Now, going back to internalizing OOC informatin:
>
>My personal experience with "objective" descriptions is that they convey
>way to much valuable information. As a player I'm then stuck either
>having to use or trying to internalize it. Using it usually offends my
>sensibilities since I don't consider it fair. Internalizing it is a real
>chore and forces me to actively try to make an OOC object into an IC
>object. Usually, that pulls me out of character.
This seems like a simple difference in information processing: I find
it fairly effortless to translate an overview into a character's
perspective in most cases; it's the absence of mechanical aids
to visualization for complex tactical scenes that tends drop me OOC
because the results I come up with are hash, which is distracting.
>OTOH, a personal description, keyed to the character's perspective is
>something I can internalize very easily. I'm willing to accept the chance
>of critical information not making it across. I've also found that, like
>any other method, it doesn't work well the first few times one tries it
>but, after some time, the communication cues between GM and player get
>ironed out and the number of assumption clashes usually drops to an
>acceptable level.
>
>My experience, when using that approach, which I've been doing for over 3
>years now, is that the number of assumption clashes did not increase at
>all (I'm discountingng the first couple of sessions since the whole group
>was aware of the experiment and we were actively working on it so that it
>would work). The type of clashes did change, though.
How did they change?
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
>My personal experience with "objective" descriptions is that they convey
>way to much valuable information. As a player I'm then stuck either
>having to use or trying to internalize it. Using it usually offends my
>sensibilities since I don't consider it fair. Internalizing it is a real
>chore and forces me to actively try to make an OOC object into an IC
>object. Usually, that pulls me out of character.
Wow--this is a much better way of stating my problem than I have been
able to articulate so far. What Alain says here captures the problem
my players are reporting with substantial accuracy, I think. What he
said :)
Best,
Kevin
Keran
On 17 Sep 1997 16:49:42 GMT, ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme)
wrote:
>
>Keran (kera...@mail1.nai.net) writes:
>> On 17 Sep 1997 03:52:33 GMT, ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme)
>> wrote:
>>
<snip>
>
>Well sure. Depending on how one manipulates ifnormation, one will not get
>the same result. that's the whole point of the manipulation.
>
>The potential conflicts you refer to are, to me, directly related to how a
>player internalizes OOC information. The same information provided by a
>GM to two different players can be interprested totally
>differently if the two players have a different mecahnism to hanlde OOC
>information.
That's certainly true.
> My ability to internalize "objective" information is limited
>and usually results in me firewalling too much info (ie I ignore stuff my
>character might be privy to). This means that the GM will think I'm
>operating on more info than I really am operating under. Which,
>eventually will lead to assumption clashes.
>
>eg:"objective description"
> GM: "Hey how come you ignored that?"
> Player: "Because my PC couldn't see it"
> GM: "Uh? I figured that his high combat intuition would handle that"
> Player: "Really? It just looked to me like that was pushing
>intuition too far"
Mmm. I've never had a discussion like that: it feels rather foreign. I
suppose it may have something to do with never having played, or
allowed, a character with a trait like combat intuition or danger
sense, both of which impress me as rather nebulous.
It's not that I don't think there's any such quality that you could
call 'intuition', but when someone proposes such traits for a
character, I insist on having a physical model of how it's supposed
to work. I tend to view intuition as the ability to interpret stimuli
quickly and subconsciously; the stimuli themselves may be a bit
below the threshold of consciousness. But the character has to
be in a position to receive the stimuli for it to work, in that case:
if a character couldn't see or hear anything I wouldn't expect
him to have any hunches about it.--There's a possible exception
to that in that I might also regard intuition as the ability to
quickly and subconsciously recognize patterns, so if several
of the things the character could sense formed into a particular
pattern, he might guess something he couldn't sense.
I don't think I'd be able to play such a trait without having this
kind of model of how it works. I don't know how I'd figure out
what to ignore, and I don't know how I'd translate whatever
knowledge the trait produced to the character's point of view.
That *would* be frustrating.
<snip>
>My point:
>How a player handles the OOC information is critical in the choice of
>the presentation method of that information. It's not just of question of
>limited bandwidth, it's also a queestion of signal to noise ratio. Too
>much noise and you miss important signals. And, the problem is that one
>person's noise is another person's signal.
True.
Keran
On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 21:30:13 GMT, krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
wrote:
>On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 09:04:50 GMT, kera...@mail1.nai.net (Keran)
>wrote:
>
>
>A brief aside, Keran. We've been talking past each other a bit. I
>don't provide 3D sketches to my players because I am not a
>sufficiently good artist.
I didn't really think you did. 3D is something of a preoccupation of
mine and I'll be putting up renderings of important pieces of scenery
on my Web page as I get the modelling done, but I'm pretty sure I
couldn't handle it myself for combat improvised even if I were playing
face to face. It'd be tempting to try, though.
> What I do is to offer diagrammatic
>sketches, mostly 2D, which represent not the objective reality per se,
>but rather the reality that the character percieves.
>
>For example, you are plaing a warrior type is in a melee, and your
>character dispatches his opponent. (Decision point). A beefy
>berserker fellow is bearing down on him from the front. My sketch
>will emphasize the precise location of the berserker, since he is the
>most prominent threat and the focus of your attention. I'll indicate
>loosly "there is a group of people fighting off to your left which you
>catch out of the corner of your eye" and then indicate the rough
>position of that group on the sketch--but I don't show that in fact
>there are five people over to the left, one of whom is your poor
>Paladin, sadly beset by enemies.
I probably wouldn't give a figure for the size of the group; if the
character were in a position where he could see the paladin
peripherally, I'd be likely to note that he was there because
known objects can be recognized from very sketchy visual
data, and let the player decide whether the character is likely
to notice or not. I note that that kind of decision can vary a lot
from character to character, however--some people are much
more aware of peripheral vision and sounds they're not focused
on than others are. Perhaps 'aware' is not the word I want; I don't
mean to imply that the character is paying attention to what's on
the periphery, but that some people will form subconscious
impressions of who's where which, while vague, they may recall
as soon as they're not distracted.
>Even when everyone in the room knows that the Paladin is taking it in
>the teeth because he is so badly outnumbered, when I present the
>information this way it stresses what the character knows with
>precision and what he knows only sketchily, which my players have
>found more conducive to being IC. It sort of serves as a reminder of
>what is IC knowledge and what is OOC, if that makes sense.
>
>Now obviously I have to make decisions as to what a character can
>perceive well and what less so--but I can use whatever perception
>mechanic we have agreed upon to do that, it seems to me.
I don't think I'd have any problem with this; it seems like it would
be very clear.
>>I do find quantity to be an issue. To paint it in very broad
>>brush strokes, the large quantity of sensory data the players
>>don't get that the characters would is at least as important
>>to me as the information that the players get that the characters
>>wouldn't.
>
>Sure--I can see this. What techniques do you use to accomplish this?
Well--bear in mind that I rarely consider my own combat scenes
entirely successful. I really consider combat--or any other kind of
problem posed to the characters where positional information is
critical--to be *two* things, not one:
1) The positional information and its changes with respect to time.
2) The sensory impressions of the scene.
Now 1) I cannot usually execute in a satisfactory manner on the MUX
because I can't sketch on everybody's screen while things are
happening, and my own inability to track position well or quickly
without mechanical assistance tends to interfere horrendously
with my ability to interpret what the players say their characters
are doing.
I'm going to try to mitigate it somewhat in my upcoming campaign by
modelling and rendering or mapping key locations ahead of time and
putting the graphics up on the Web page, but I certainly won't be
able to draw every location in advance, and of course that's a lot of
graphic work to do and I won't necessarily be able to keep up.
When I do have diagrams, I don't have much trouble translating the
overhead into a first-person view, as a character, while remaining
immersed. I don't know about all the players for the next campaign
and, since we don't have the opportunity to mess up anyone's IC
with an overhead, I'm not likely to find out.
2), on the other hand, I've had a fair amount of success with. Call
the overhead/positional diagram the part that carries the objective
world model information, and call the descriptions of the sensory
impressions the part I'm going to use to generate the You Are There
feeling.
To do this it's been helpful to me to take into account what the
senses are like in reality, and then the difference between real
world senses and gameworld descriptions. In reality the senses
convey a staggering amount of information every second, and
you have absolutely no hope of even approaching this. However,
almost all of the information is shunted to the background; your
conscious attention is on a tiny fraction of the impressions you're
receiving at any particular time, and this you can imitate, by
producing intense, tightly focused descriptions of sensory
impressions of very particular things.
Sight is perhaps the most dominant sense, followed by hearing;
the others are often neglected. You can frequently add a lot of
impact and vividness if you describe something people are likely
to neglect--what it feels like to rotate a sword around its center
of percussion, the sensation of beginning to lose your balance
and knowing you're going to fall without being able to stop it, or
what a sweaty orc's breath smells like if you end up grappling him.
If you're doing visual descriptions, it can help to focus on one
individual thing and then sweep to another object along a specific
line of sight.
You probably wouldn't want to deal with the things the character
isn't focusing on this way; it would be highly distracting. I almost
have a two-pass approach to information, the first for the overview
to tell the player what there is that his character might be concerned
with, and the second for the focus of the character's attention.
Here is a section of the most recent session I ran that included
any kind of physical confrontation. This is the part of the
confrontation that I consider successful--the earlier part was
still fun to play, but I thought my descriptions were too vague:
I had a nebulous grip on who was precisely where, and it
detracted from my sense of place and ability to visualize the
scene. In this part of the scene, the characters have closed, and
I don't have any confusion owing to badly-visualized objective
information any more, so it deals entirely with the PC's individual
view.
The situation: Malitol, a journeyman mage and Shazemar's
former graduate student assistant at the College of Magics,
has returned for the fall semester to find out that Shazemar is
apparently dead, having been killed while trying to turn himself
into a lich. Actually, Shazemar survived undead, though the murder
in the middle had some bizarre side effects, including some memory
loss. Shazemar had prepared a cottage in the enchanted forest
nearby and moved his library and supplies to it, beforehand; Malitol
has gone to the cottage thinking his master dead, intend on retrieving
his books and gear. Malitol has disguised himself with a glamour that
should render him invisible to normal sight; Shazemar sees by magic,
as a lich, and can tell where he is but not who he is--though
Shazemar would probably guess, but for the memory loss. Shazemar
has also concealed himself magically, having returned to
the cottage and hearing someone within, but he has an aura
that screams, "Something wicked this way comes." Neither one
of them, therefore, can tell who the other is, exactly where the
other is, or precisely what the other is doing, but they're aware
of each other's presence. Malitol is trying to escape from the
*thing*, and Shazemar is trying to keep the unknown intruder
from getting away and reporting the location of his hiding place.
Shazemar has raised a magical barrier against anyone's leaving
the clearing, and Malitol is trying to disrupt it and escape. He has
his back to Shazemar and is trying to take the barrier down before
his antagonist can catch with him; they both still have concealment
spells active. (Malitol's typing everything that begins with his name;
the rest is me.)
Malitol is inspired. And has seen the unusual pattern [of the barrier]
before, although he's too busy to worry about that, now. He probably
starts breaking through it with a speed shocking to Shazemar... but
possibly not fast enough.
Something very, very cold rests lightly on your shoulder.
A skeleton's hand.
You feel something drawing power out of your spells.
Malitol makes a last desperate effort and brings down the shield as
his arm goes numb and the breath is driven from his body. He stumbles
to his knees, two paces outside the circle, and twists away from you,
ending up on the ground staring upwards.
Malitol's hideme spell is entirely gone.
You feel a weight behind you, clinging to your shoulder, as you do. It
probably doesn't weigh much more than 15 lbs. You end up dragging it
through with you, and it spills to the ground nearby with a clatter
and a breathless yelp.
The skeleton fingers are twined in your clothing. The thing attached
to them is wearing Shazemar's blue cloak and surcoat, and it has a
dead white but very familiar face. Blue eyes blink at you.
Malitol's mouth drops open, and he momentarily looks stupefied.
"S-s-shazemar???"
[Bone mass is about 8.5% of body mass, and Shazemar is a lich-ghost
variant whose corporeal part is entirely skeletal. He's been undead
for about 2 weeks when this happens, and he isn't used enough to
the condition to have anticipated getting pulled off his feet so
easily.]
A Lapalme
As usual, John did a great job of taking the discussion and distilling it
to categories which encapsulate the discussion quite well.
John H Kim (jh...@labdien.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> DIAGRAMS:
> D1) Rough overhead map of the area (but not people): I think that
> most people are agreed that this is a useful way of conveying
> spatial relations that is difficult to verbalize or sketch.
Yes.
>
> D2) Ground-level POV sketches: This is good if done well, but
> strongly limited by the GM's artistic ability. If done poorly
> these can result in much confusion regarding perspective.
>
It was an interesting concept when I first read it. However, as you say,
it can be limiting if one is artisticly challenged. Furthermore, I would
find it slow and cumbersome. My style is heavily verbal with strong
physical support (ie body posture). Stopping to draw a diagram would
break the flow of my thoughts.
> D3) Rough map with counters: This is a large-ish map placed
> on the table with impromptu counters on it representing the
> figures. This is not "objective" -- if an opponent is not
> seen by the PC's, he will not be marked with a counter on
> the map. Rather, the map is simply a way of conveying
> spatial perceptions. Where verbally the GM might say,
> GM: "The terrorist runs to behind the pillars?"
> Player: "Wait -- where is that again? Did he just run
> through Mack's field of fire, or did he run behind
> the fountain here?"
>
Yes. This is roughly how I use counters.
> D4) Scaled Battle-Map: This is usually used in conjunction with
> hex-based mechanics, where objective movement, range, and
> possibly facing are determined on the basis of the map.
> Even so, unseen opponents or features are generally not
> shown on the map.
>
Understood.
> VERBAL DESCRIPTION:
>
> V1) Encapsulated Facts: The GM tries to briefly outline what is
> happening where in a single description to all players. This
> may include some qualifiers, such as "Those who are closest
> can see that there are multiple bulges under the men's jackets."
> Additional information may come from player questions or
> GM elaboration.
> GM: "OK, the terrorist sprints in a crouch for the pillars
> on the far side of the fountain. Mack fires a burst just
> as he dives behind cover."
> "Mack, you think your burst went high."
> "Jean?"
> Player: "I jump at the sound and flatten back against the
> door, and call out to Mack: `What the hell was that?' "
>
While I agree this category deserves its own slot, does anyone actually
use this approach? I'm curious to hear how it works out.
>
> V2) Individualized Views: The GM may give general remarks, but
> the bulk is described as individual POV descriptions. This
> requires some repetition and interpretation on the GM's part.
> For example,
> GM: "OK, Mack, you see the terrorist run in front of the
> fountain -- you line up a shot just as he is headed for
> the pillars, but your burst goes high."
> "Now Jean, you turn from guarding the corridor and see a
> fleeting form run behind the fountain into the pillars.
> There is a burst of gunfire flashing from Mack's position."
> Player: "I spin towards the pillars and scan for a target."
>
That's my approach.
> V3) Subjective Views: Here the GM gives emotionally slanted or
> leading descriptions to each player, to represent what the
> PC apprehends (i.e. not just what she sees).
>
This is _not_ my approach.
> -*-*-*-
>
> Note that in (V2), the GM takes more responsibility for where
> the PC's attention is, among other things. In the more "factual"
> approach, the player decides on the basis of the outlined scene
> that his character didn't see anything. While in (V2) the GM
> decides this for him. This is still true in (V1), however, as
> the GM must decide what facts to give to the players as a whole.
I'll have to quibble a bit here. Depends on the decision is made. In
my case, decisions are based, more often than not on character traits and
skills. I will agree, though, that the GM does take more responsability.
However,(there is always one), my first foray into V2 included mostly D4
(hex map). While we did not use formalize mechanics to make decisions,
the player did have a very good view of what was happening. I added the
PC POV descriptions to help the player limit his/her actions to what the
character was aware of. Eventually, I drifted towards D3, D2 and D1 (and
the one chosen depends on the circumstances) and away from D4 because I
found that the extra detail didn't seem to help anyone. With a different
group of people it might have been different. Anyways, all of this to say
that one can combine D4 and V2 to reduce the GM's responsability.
>
> That is, in (V1) the GM must decide what the PC's in general
> see, and selectively decide on that. In (V2) this is multiplied in
> that he must distinguish between each of the individual PC's.
While, on the surface, this might seem like a lot of work, it isn't, at
least to me. However, this might be, as I pointed out last week, a
natural consequence of my diceless combat style. I need to visualize the
scene in my head from several perspectives. Dropping into one POV and
then verbalizing that POV is not a big jump.
>
> -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
> A Lapalme <ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>>My ability to internalize "objective" information is limited and
>>usually results in me firewalling too much info (ie I ignore stuff my
>>character might be privy to). This means that the GM will think I'm
>>operating on more info than I really am operating under. Which,
>>eventually will lead to assumption clashes.
>
> This sounds to me like a basic assumption clash, actually.
> It seems like the GM is simply assuming to much -- that your
> character perceives what he tells you the player. The choice of
> how the description works is a matter of game contract -- i.e. who
> is responsible for deciding on the character's perceptions.
>
???But isn't this whole discussion about assumption clash. The for and
against the different methods which have been discusse come down to:
"I don't want the GM to tell me how my character feels"
"I want to make sure I have all the information I can have because
the GM can't tell me everything so I might miss something important"
"I want to make sure I only act on information which my character
would have"
"etc.."
In any case, the point of my example is that one is prone to as many
conflicting assumptions, regardless of the approach taken. The difference
lies in what kind of clashes these are. Some people can live with certain
type of clashes, other can live with other type of clashes.
> -*-*-*-
>>
>>eg:"objective description"
>> GM: "Hey how come you ignored that?"
>> Player: "Because my PC couldn't see it"
>> GM: "Uh? I figured that his high combat intuition would handle that"
>> Player: "Really? It just looked to me like that was pushing
>> intuition too far"
>
> Hmm. Well, if you are going to play with objective
> description, as a player you should probably verbalize what your
> character sees/believes with action declaration. For example,
> you could say, "Well, I didn't see that, so figuring the noise
> to be from elsewhere, I charge."
Hmm...so, in this case,you are forcing a certain style of play upon a
player. This goes back to the discussion we had a few weeks ago on how
one verbalizes PC actions. The above sentence would not be something I
would say. "I charge" is all I would have say. If someone wants to know
the why, they can ask later.
And, really, aren't you passing the decision back to the GM? The player
verbalizes why a certain action is taken, the GM tells him that his
intuitive skill would tell him more so player changes decision to have it
fall in line with the GM's perception. I don't know but this looks like
the GM is still taking responsability.
>
> -*-*-*-
>>
>>eg: "subjective description"
>> GM: "As you face your opponent, you have this itchy feeling at the
>> back of your neck"
>>
>>Player choice one:
>> Player: "I look around, for a quick second, just to see..."
>> GM: "OK, you see some motion behind you. Meanwhile, your opponent
>> is taking advantage of your moment of distraction by ..."
>>
>>Player choice two:
>> Player:"Well, whatever it is, I'll ignore. That guy in front of
>> me needs attention"
>> GM: "OK."
>> and gm goes on with description.
>
>
> This is a good example, and let me elaborate on what is going
> on here. The GM here needs details of how the PC is acting and
> somewhat more implicitly what his state is. He is assuming a
> middle ground between [A] the PC being aware of his surroundings,
> and [B] the PC being focussed on the enemy to the point that he
> doesn't even feel what is behind him.
>
> Further, tt is not at all clear to me how a player should
> interpret this "itchy feeling". What does an "itchy feeling" mean
> to my In-Character view? Did I see a shadow out of the corner of
> my eye, or did I hear something?
The "itchy feeling" bit would have previously been discussed during
character creation (ie how does the intuition thing works). Sorry about
not explaining the details of it. In this particular case, the intuition
thing was meant to be something that is nearly unconscious. The PC doe
snot know exactly if it is a shadow, a sound, a sensation (like air
movement), etc..
>
> This is not an pure perception, but rather description of
> a feeling.
How else would you provide a pure perception description? The itchy
feeling thing is colour, or, more precisely, an implementation detail.
For example, what *sort* of "itchy feeling" this is
> can make a difference to how my character reacts to it. As an
> example, an earlier PC of mine in the Ripper game began developing
> paranoia. In my view, he pretty soon had very regular itchy
> feelings on his neck...
>
Well, how did the itchy feelings worked? I think we are not understanding
each other here.
Are you equating feeling with emotion?
Brett Evill
>John H Kim (jh...@labdien.cc.columbia.edu) wrote:
>> V1) Encapsulated Facts: The GM tries to briefly outline what is
>> happening where in a single description to all players. This
>> may include some qualifiers, such as "Those who are closest
>> can see that there are multiple bulges under the men's jackets."
>> Additional information may come from player questions or
>> GM elaboration.
>> GM: "OK, the terrorist sprints in a crouch for the pillars
>> on the far side of the fountain. Mack fires a burst just
>> as he dives behind cover."
>> "Mack, you think your burst went high."
>> "Jean?"
>> Player: "I jump at the sound and flatten back against the
>> door, and call out to Mack: `What the hell was that?' "
In article <5vr5v0$p...@freenet-news.carleton.ca>,
ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme) replied:
>While I agree this category deserves its own slot, does anyone actually
>use this approach? I'm curious to hear how it works out.
I use it all the time, as I figure the players are smart enough to work
out which bits to take in character and which bits in audience mode.
Occasionally I support it with V2 descriptions aimed at a single
character. But basically, if a character is not there, I don't find it
necessary to keep telling its player that he or she sees nothing germane.
The way I treat a character who is partially there is a smooth
interpolation.
--
Brett Evill
To reply, replace 'nospam' with 'b.evill' in the
email address <nos...@tyndale.apana.org.au>.
Psychohist
John Kim lists four levels of tactical diagrams of which the highest is:
D4) Scaled Battle-Map: This is usually used in conjunction
with hex-based mechanics, where objective movement,
range, and possibly facing are determined on the basis of
the map. Even so, unseen opponents or features are
generally not shown on the map.
This is what I use, though without the hexes. However, I go further in
that I try to use figurines that accurately represent the characters'
armor, clothing, and weapons. This isn't so much to present the additional
information as to prevent the 'that doesn't look like my character' problem
that some immersive players here have mentioned.
Warren Dew
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
It does occur to me that we may very well adopt
positions here on rgfa that are more firm than
what we might take in real life.
Yes - a fact of life on usenet, I suspect. Taking the extra time to
examine both sides of the question usually just results in fewer responses.
I'm curious - do most of your players also wargame? It suddenly struck me
that regular wargamers, used to using all of the tactical information
available to try to win the game, might find it particularly hard to
firewall such information in a roleplaying game when it was presented in
somewhat wargame like display.
I suspect that no matter what descriptive form is used, problems are less
likely to arise when the characters are unlikely to be killed. In deadly
battles, the ego identification inherent in immersive play might make
firewalling of tactical information particularly difficult; likewise,
players are likely to be particularly upset at gamesmaster omissions of
information the player thinks the character should have when such an
omission results in the character's death.
Having a game where the characters have a good chance to avoid combats
they're not sure they can win helps a lot in this respect.
Warren Dew
Mark Grundy
Warren writes:
| I suspect that no matter what descriptive form is used, problems are
| less likely to arise when the characters are unlikely to be killed.
| In deadly battles, the ego identification inherent in immersive play
| might make firewalling of tactical information particularly difficult;
| likewise, players are likely to be particularly upset at gamesmaster
| omissions of information the player thinks the character should have
| when such an omission results in the character's death.
| Having a game where the characters have a good chance to avoid combats
| they're not sure they can win helps a lot in this respect.
It depends on the play agreement for handling character risk, too.
I run a lot of games that encourage the players to take extra character
risks to advance the drama. In compensation, the story helps protect
their characters during those risky times. For the sake of drama, I
insist that they play their character knowledge rather than their player
knowledge during those times in the game.
But there are also times in these games when there's plenty of risk
but not much drama, and at those times I'm happy for the characters to
wimp out for any plausible reason, regardless of the degree of
out-of-character knowledge used.
So the terrain shifts a bit in some of our games, and for this
reason I don't like to blame players for steering wrong. The players
themselves are keen to make the game look good, and at the same time
balance their play interests and plans with what they imagine are my own
story directions. So it's really a communication issue for all of us.
A Lapalme
Psychohist (psych...@aol.com) writes:
> Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
>
> It does occur to me that we may very well adopt
> positions here on rgfa that are more firm than
> what we might take in real life.
>
> Yes - a fact of life on usenet, I suspect. Taking the extra time to
> examine both sides of the question usually just results in fewer responses.
>
> I'm curious - do most of your players also wargame? It suddenly struck me
> that regular wargamers, used to using all of the tactical information
> available to try to win the game, might find it particularly hard to
> firewall such information in a roleplaying game when it was presented in
> somewhat wargame like display.
>
I do wargame and I think what you say makes a lot of sense.
If I see a tactical situation, I want to use it.
Bard Bloom H1-B50 x6262
I mostly GM fantasy games. Oddly enough, I do it for realism.
I do prefer interesting settings: fantasy or science fiction, or
Cthulhuvian horror.
I insist on making matters as reasonable as possible except
where that interferes with gaming. So, I use a very simple
combat system because nobody in my troupe enjoys gaming fights
much. But I'll pull out a CRC tables and calculator when we need
to figure out how much the metal frame on a door weighs.
Fantasy lets me make up my setting with no undesired constraints.
If I want a million-mile radius of universe full of air, I can have it --
and the air god will make sure that the pressure is constant
throughout the universe. Physical laws can simply be different.
Science fiction imposes a higher standard, which I do not think I can
meet. The world ought to be based on physics and chemistry.
Known science ought to be true (or overridden); future science
ought to be consistent with everything known. I'm just not willing to
do that much work.
So, I stick with fantasy worlds. This doesn't mean Tolkein-derived
D&D worlds; simply worlds in which the odd physical laws are explicitly
magic (mediated by gods with personalities and opinions), rather than
just effectively magic under Clarke's law.
The social systems and world details are where I spend most of my time.
They're done in the classical hard-SF style: I try to work out the
social consequences of the magical reality in detail. World-tree
society is undergoing a major revolution due to the invention of
a new magical discipline, as much of a shock to that world as computers
are to ours.
I don't feel competant to do that job with a science fiction setting, or (say)
a 1998-based political game. There's simply more constraint, more requirement
to match reality, than I want to deal with during game preparation.
Or I could simply suspend disbelief and not worry about getting the
population of Argentina, the speed of a 2004 AD computer, and
the lack of impact of a vampire community among the general population wrong
by a couple orders of magnitude. But if I'm doing that, it's
just about a fantasy game anyways, so why not be honest from the start?
-- Bard
John H Kim
A quick comment about what constitutes "fantasy" here, in
reply to Bard Bloom. The original post specifically referred to
the swords-and-sorcery genre and why it remained popular.
The broad term "fantasy" which Bard suggests (i.e. anything
with magic) covers a vast range of genres which spread very
widely.
Bard Bloom H1-B50 x6262 <ba...@watson.ibm.com> wrote:
>Fantasy lets me make up my setting with no undesired constraints.
>If I want a million-mile radius of universe full of air, I can have
>it -- and the air god will make sure that the pressure is constant
>throughout the universe. Physical laws can simply be different.
>
>Science fiction imposes a higher standard, which I do not think I
>can meet. The world ought to be based on physics and chemistry.
>Known science ought to be true (or overridden); future science
>ought to be consistent with everything known.
Eh? If your only two categories here are "fantasy"
(violates scientific laws) and "science fiction" (complies with
all scientific laws), then I see your point. The genres of
Hard SF and technothrillers, for example, are difficult to
stay within.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>So, I stick with fantasy worlds. This doesn't mean Tolkein-derived
>D&D worlds; simply worlds in which the odd physical laws are explicitly
>magic (mediated by gods with personalities and opinions), rather than
>just effectively magic under Clarke's law.
[...]
>Or I could simply suspend disbelief and not worry about getting the
>population of Argentina, the speed of a 2004 AD computer, and
>the lack of impact of a vampire community among the general population
>wrong by a couple orders of magnitude. But if I'm doing that, it's
>just about a fantasy game anyways, so why not be honest from the start?
I guess I'm confused about your category here. For example,
the World of Darkness (including _Vampire_ which you mention above)
has explicitly magical laws. Are you somehow considering it
not "fantasy" for your comparision? Your criteria would seem
to imply categories of:
1) Surreal worlds which follow magic and don't follow normal
physical laws
2) Magic worlds where normal physical laws are mostly obeyed,
with exceptions in the case of magic
3) Mundane worlds where only known physical laws are true
I think the vast majority of games fall into category (2),
including _AD&D_, _Feng Shui_, _Deadlands_, _Castle Falkenstein_,
_Star Wars_, _Champions_, etc. The only game in (1) that springs
to mind is _Toon_, although there may be others.
If you don't agree with this: in what sense is the World
of Darkness different than AD&D?
Brett Evill
In article <19970918191...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
> I try to use figurines that accurately represent the characters'
>armor, clothing, and weapons. This isn't so much to present the additional
>information as to prevent the 'that doesn't look like my character' problem
>that some immersive players here have mentioned.
It is hard to get suitable figures for some settings, because the
figure-makers make little allowance for PCs in classical Mediterranean or
mediaeval Balinese costume.