"The term 'GNS' is moronic and annoying" – well this should be an interesting interview

[Pedantic]

I’m not sure whether or not you’re saying my system wouldn’t be to your taste, which is fine if not, but one thing I do want to clarify is that I am trying to systematize as much of the resolution process as possible. I say as much as possible and not fully because the GM does need the ability to establish situations and say what happens (since players lack the systemic authority to do that), but the GM is constrained in how they do that. It would be a misplay to pull things out of nowhere, and consequence-foregrounding is an important technique for avoiding that.

(As an aside, the idea to explicitly foreground consequences comes from my experience playing in @Manbearcat’s Torchbearer 2e and Blades in the Dark campaigns. He was really good at making sure we knew the stakes, though he wasn’t systematizing it like I am.)

I view the "establishment of situations" as an incorrect reading of the GM's role. They establish and populate a setting as a worldbuilder and separately animate the forces/people/things inside that setting. Situation is an emergent property of the interactions between those roles, the actions of the PCs and the results output by the system (which should encode the impact of actions separately from setting and actors; the GM role that should be most deprecated is GM-as-adjudicator).

Once you move directly to situations, you necessarily conflate the GM's roles, and run into questions about agency, though you're clearly working on another angle to resolve that. I think you run into a trade-off of immersion, in exchange for hopefully getting something stronger than a GM's professional responsibility to separate actions taken while embodying different roles.

 

[pemerton]

To add to my preceding post:

Posters can post about "emergent story" and "writers' rooms" all day long, and all night as well if they like. But that is not going to change the fact that the process of play used in the Burning Wheel game that I described, and in the Stonetop game that @AbdulAlhazred described, is pretty different from some other common ways of playing RPGs.

It's obviously different from a map-and-key approach, where the framing of scenes and much of the consequence depends on the interplay between (i) what the GM has prepared in the drawing up and keying of their map, and (ii) *what decisions the players make about where their PCs move on the map.

It's also obviously different from an approach where the GM has prepared, or is independently imagining, a series of scenes or events that they will present to the players for the players to engage with via their PCs.

And it's also different from an approach where the GM has a collection of setting notes, and uses these to determine what happens to the PCs and extrapolate the consequences of the players' declared actions. I think this is obviously so for the Burning Wheel example; it's more subtle in the Stonetop example, but the key differences are the way the emergence of the enemy is "triggered" as an event in the fiction (by the players' failed action involving their PCs somewhere else doing something else) and also the way the thread is centred on things that are dear to the PCs (their followers and their ally).

Now in this post I've contrasted techniques, not goals of play. But I think we can see how these differences of technique are suited to differences of goal. Mushing it all together doesn't help anyone improve, or get more fun out of, their RPGing!

 

[pemerton]

I view the "establishment of situations" as an incorrect reading of the GM's role.

How can it be incorrect, when the rulebook for the game - say, Burning Wheel, the 4e D&D PHB, or (I assume) @kenada's proto-rulebook - says that that is what the GM is expected to do?

They establish and populate a setting as a worldbuilder and separately animate the forces/people/things inside that setting. Situation is an emergent property of the interactions between those roles, the actions of the PCs and the results output by the system (which should encode the impact of actions separately from setting and actors; the GM role that should be most deprecated is GM-as-adjudicator).

This is one possible set of techniques. Referring back to my post just upthread, it combines a map-and-key approach ("establish and populate a setting") with the approach of extrapolation from setting notes ("animate the forces/people/things inside that setting').

I think it's obvious that this set of techniques will not produce anything like the RPG experience of @AbdulAlhazred's Stonetop game, or my Burning Wheel game. That's not per se a criticism of the techniques; but reinforces that they are not the only one's available, and that they have no particular normative priority in the universe of RPGing.

Once you move directly to situations, you necessarily conflate the GM's roles, and run into questions about agency, though you're clearly working on another angle to resolve that. I think you run into a trade-off of immersion, in exchange for hopefully getting something stronger than a GM's professional responsibility to separate actions taken while embodying different roles.

Most of the GMing that I do, and the play that I do, involves "moving directly to situations" - Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel, a fair bit of Torchbearer, the way I run Classic Traveller, my one-shots of Wuthering Heights and Cthulhu Dark. There are no questions about "agency" - the relationship between the players' decision-making, and the framing of situations, is not mysterious. And these are highly immersive games - the fiction is vivid, the character choices confronting, the stakes evident, the consequences meaningful.

 

[niklinna]

I view the "establishment of situations" as an incorrect reading of the GM's role. They establish and populate a setting as a worldbuilder and separately animate the forces/people/things inside that setting.

This has not been true of many games I have played in. Sometimes the GM and players establish and populate the setting—sometimes it's just the players! Somtimes the players animate particular forces/people/things inside the setting. Sometimes there have been two people GMing; sometimes they each animate their own forces/people/things, sometimes they freely say who does what.

Situation is an emergent property of the interactions between those roles, the actions of the PCs and the results output by the system (which should encode the impact of actions separately from setting and actors; the GM role that should be most deprecated is GM-as-adjudicator).

Huh? A situation is a setting with (usually) people in it and with things happening. It may have been (partly) generated by system output, but it could also be just what's happening next, initiated by either GM or player.

Once you move directly to situations, you necessarily conflate the GM's roles, and run into questions about agency, though you're clearly working on another angle to resolve that. I think you run into a trade-off of immersion, in exchange for hopefully getting something stronger than a GM's professional responsibility to separate actions taken while embodying different roles.

Well since I thought you had already conflated them up above, I don't understand this at all. And of the trade-offs I've seen in these different approaches, immersion has not been one of them. For me immersion is much more about how well all the participants describe, approach, and engage with the situations.

 

[FrogReaver]

To add to my preceding post:

Posters can post about "emergent story" and "writers' rooms" all day long, and all night as well if they like. But that is not going to change the fact that the process of play used in the Burning Wheel game that I described, and in the Stonetop game that @AbdulAlhazred described, is pretty different from some other common ways of playing RPGs.

It's obviously different from a map-and-key approach, where the framing of scenes and much of the consequence depends on the interplay between (i) what the GM has prepared in the drawing up and keying of their map, and (ii) *what decisions the players make about where their PCs move on the map.

It's also obviously different from an approach where the GM has prepared, or is independently imagining, a series of scenes or events that they will present to the players for the players to engage with via their PCs.

And it's also different from an approach where the GM has a collection of setting notes, and uses these to determine what happens to the PCs and extrapolate the consequences of the players' declared actions. I think this is obviously so for the Burning Wheel example; it's more subtle in the Stonetop example, but the key differences are the way the emergence of the enemy is "triggered" as an event in the fiction (by the players' failed action involving their PCs somewhere else doing something else) and also the way the thread is centred on things that are dear to the PCs (their followers and their ally).

Now in this post I've contrasted techniques, not goals of play. But I think we can see how these differences of technique are suited to differences of goal. Mushing it all together doesn't help anyone improve, or get more fun out of, their RPGing!

It’s odd to me that the people you are most trying to convince the games are different are those that don’t like them. Of course they know they are different, they like one and not the other. The conversation that keeps occurring is around what are the key differences not whether there are any differences.

 

[pemerton]

of the trade-offs I've seen in these different approaches, immersion has not been one of them. For me immersion is much more about how well all the participants describe, approach, and engage with the situations.

Right.

So, what I take @Pedantic to be asserting with respect to immersion is something I've seen others assert in a similar sort of way. Hence why I take it to be what is intended.

It's along these lines: necessarily, if the player is aware that the situation is a fiction being created here-and-now in response to some immediate thematic or dramatic provocation, then they can't be immersed in it.

It is often presented as if it were a logical truth; but obviously it's an empirical claim about the relationship between various psychological/cognitive states and processes. In Apocalypse World, Baker tackles the issue via the principles "Make your move, but misdirect" and "Make your move, but never speak its name". I think the so-called "writer's room" is another way of tackling it - when you're calling for your Devil's Bargain, and you're imagining yourself in the fiction and thinking about al the forces arrayed against you that could make things worse, you're not alienating yourself from the fiction - you're letting it fill your mind and dominate your thinking and "reveal" itself to you. (That last is metaphor, but then so is the word "immersion" itself.)

 

[pemerton]

The conversation that keeps occurring is around what are the key differences not whether there are any differences.

In some other recent thread you were positing spectrums, and multi-dimensional spaces, in which all RPGs manifest "narrative tendencies".

You have more than once asserted that "narrativist" 5e D&D is a thing.

I'm still waiting for the examples.

 

[niklinna]

Is "writer's room" just another restatement of the "don't let me make decisions outside my character's actions" thing? That's a usual sticking point, because it's either vitally important, or eye-rollingly unrealistic depending on your perspective.

That's only one small part of "writers' room". It's more about crafting the story as an object or artifact to be presented (or enjoyed later) in a particular way, as opposed to letting a story emerge. Yes, in a writers' room everybody is more or less free to suggest actions for any character, PC or NPC, but more significantly, they can change facts "retroactively" or lay out a sequence of "future" events, as long as they get buy-in from everybody else (which may be through regular dialogue or through some formalized system). I use scare quotes there because it's also entirely possible in a writers' room situation to craft a story out of temporal sequence, just as some crafted stories present their events out of temporal sequence.

I respect @kenada immensely for the design work to try and circle the square by aggressively foregrounding consequences as a compromise position. It's essentially taking a thing I've brought up as a solution to agency in rulings play "let the PCs propose actions, and be informed of the resolution method and consequences before committing to the check," just workshopped down small enough to be a usable mechanic.

How is it a compromise when it's doing what he wants?

Fundamentally, I don't think I'd ever be happy with that being anything but a strictly predetermined system side outcome. I simply don't see any way that negotiating position can't be harmful to immersion. That unique alchemy is performed, in my opinion, by limiting the space between character and player decision making as much as possible. Characters are incapable of negotiating with reality; the consequences of their actions are intrinsic to the actions themselves. "Realism" is usually just a proxy for completeness, along with a sniff test for believability of system defined outcomes.

Ah, this must be getting back to the narrow idea of "writers' room" above. I don't find it harmful to my immersion to propose complications and such, although I can see how it could be for others (also depending on one's personal idea of "immersion"). And, no system could be complete enough to cover every possible outcome (other than simple succeed/fail I suppose?). The second you step outside that binary, you have GM fiat when unbounded by system or when bounded by system (in which case it is no longer actually fiat, but constrained in some agreed-upon way).

I'm not sure what you mean by "completeness".

 

[FrogReaver]

In some other recent thread you were positing spectrums, and multi-dimensional spaces, in which all RPGs manifest "narrative tendencies"

Yes, your point?

You have more than once asserted that "narrativist" 5e D&D is a thing.

Yes, your point?

I'm still waiting for the examples.

You flat out dismiss every example I’ve ever given. Why would i continue providing ones?

 

[Campbell]

There is no such thing as an incorrect reading of the GM's role that is not specific to a given game (the role does not exist outside of the game). The roles we assume at the table are artifacts of game design, not some essential component of the medium. How we break down the authority and expectations we place on each other is something we very much get to design.