What makes an TTRPG a "Narrative Game" (Daggerheart Discussion)

[clearstream]

In the context of playing a RPG, how do I learn about the fiction? On one very common approach, by being told by either (i) the author, or (ii) a mediator between me as player and the author. Namely, in both case (i) and case (ii), by having the GM tell me. That's it. There is nothing independent of the telling of the story to be "discovered" or "explored". No matter how skilled the GM, or how immersive the fiction they create, there is no independence of the "gameworld" from what they are narrating.

Stepping away from our delve into philosophical backwaters, say the to-be-imagined fact must chime for all at table with some supposed constraint? I think that question contains two halves, which can be thought about separately or may be connected - group validation, and some sort of envelope within which the new fact must fall.

I've observed folk according such "justified" imagined facts a sense of greater legitimacy than those proposed heedless of validation or constraints. A common constraint is simply following from what has been said up to now. One method of validation is to adopt a normative principle that rejects "reaching". Another is of course to accord with familiar norms except where the game text has designed exceptions.

I then observe folk going on to feel that the resultant world is more "realistic", plausible, consistent, or credible - less suspension of disbelief taxing - than a comparable one in which the facts were determined randomly or heedlessly.

Perhaps we see ways to form imagined-facts that come closer to how we accept facts about real people, places and things that we have no direct or detailed knowledge of. Matamata New Zealand, say, if one has never been there. Or even our interlocutors here, some of whom could conceivably be AIs, or not who we think we know them to be... and whose sorts of underwear we cannot be sure of.

I'm picturing that TTRPG might lean on a human habit of accepting let's call it incompletely-justified facts, helping us to accept imagined-facts - so long as they are justified in workable ways - as referring to "real" (fictional) places. An important point being that we're somehow able to judge some proposed imagined-facts as wrong or jarring, and reject them. That dichotomy may separate a "realistic" imagined world from one folk'd call "unrealistic" in a way that is meaningful... that can't be dismissed as all being equally unreal.

 

[pemerton]

Relating to your #486 this describes a version of platonism in which Holmes exists whether or not we know what sort of underwear Holmes was wearing when Watson first met him. It is perfectly respectable for platonists to say that numbers exist as abstract objects, and not consulting detectives, but some say both.

My point is that, the concrete Meinongians don't say that Holmes has one of the following three properties: being left-handed, being right-handed, or being ambidextrous. Rather, they says that he has the property of having hands, and hence has the disjunctive property of being <either left-handed or right-handed or ambidextrous>. The reason for this is that he only has the properties mentioned in the books, plus whatever further properties they entail. Being a human with hands, the disjunctive property is entailed. But no particular disjunct is entailed.

Turning to the underwear: on that model we might say that Holmes has the disjunctive property of <wearing underwear or going commando>, but there is no basis to say that one or the other of those disjuncts is a property that he has.

Likewise Meinong's gold mountain must have the property of <having some height or other>, but there is no particular number X such that it has the property of being X metres high.

 

[pemerton]

Stepping away from our delve into philosophical backwaters, say the to-be-imagined fact must chime for all at table with some supposed constraint? I think that question contains two halves, which can be thought about separately or may be connected - group validation, and some sort of envelope within which the new fact must fall.

I've observed folk according such "justified" imagined facts a sense of greater legitimacy than those proposed heedless of validation or constraints. A common constraint is simply following from what has been said up to now. One method of validation is to adopt a normative principle that rejects "reaching". Another is of course to accord with familiar norms except where the game text has designed exceptions.

I then observe folk going on to feel that the resultant world is more "realistic", plausible, consistent, or credible - less suspension of disbelief taxing - than a comparable one in which the facts were determined randomly or heedlessly.

<snip>

An important point being that we're somehow able to judge some proposed imagined-facts as wrong or jarring, and reject them. That dichotomy may separate a "realistic" imagined world from one folk'd call "unrealistic" in a way that is meaningful... that can't be dismissed as all being equally unreal.

My post to which you replied was focused more on the issue of authority than of constraint.

In my view the attempt to state general principles of constraint by reference to plausibility or credibility is quite widely overrated. After all, nearly anything may follow from nearly anything else - some golfers do get struck by lightning, after all, and some people do fall down stairs to their deaths.

I think this is why Baker, in the AW rulebook, does not try and state the requirement of following from the established fiction in terms any more precise than that (he says that it needn't be the most likely thing, but must be a possible thing).

In the Ron Edwards video that I linked to upthread, Edwards gives an example of bad content introduction: he imagines a resolution system where a player gets to say that their PC succeeds but only if they also introduce an ominous fact from a list, and the player chooses "someone is watching in the shadows". Edwards makes two points: (i) if there is no prior fiction that establishes who might be watching from the fiction, and why then this is thematically/narratively meaningless; (ii) and if it is not clear who has authority to say more stuff about this shadowy figure, then game play has degenerated into mad-libs.

I think these issues are much more important than plausibility/credibility per se: I mean, it's always plausible that someone is watching from the shadows (provided, I guess, that there are some shadows about) - but why, as a player, should I care? That is, what makes this a matter of stakes or consequence? How is it going to be brought home?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Thanks. In my defense, it's easy to miss among all the definition warring.

The other one I should have added is to go for shorter campaigns rather than intend to go for years. It puts much higher stakes on the table and much more onto the starting characters not general situations.

 

[Campbell]

I then observe folk going on to feel that the resultant world is more "realistic", plausible, consistent, or credible - less suspension of disbelief taxing - than a comparable one in which the facts were determined randomly or heedlessly.

I don't dispute that people feel more comfortable with a process of play they are more accustomed to. What I dispute is that this is actually the case. How plausible, consistent or credible an established element of the fiction is has far more to do with the thought process around it than who established it or when they established it. Things decided in the moment are no more likely to be decided on a whim. I think describing the thought process behind scene framing decisions I make when running Apocalypse World as random or heedless is incredibly inaccurate.

So, I think there is absolutely a case that the ability to intuit what has been defined by a GM but not yet revealed can make for a compelling sort of gameplay you do not get in something like Apocalypse World, but it is a mistake to confuse that with the level of consistency or credibility of the shared fiction.

 

[clearstream]

I don't dispute that people feel more comfortable with a process of play they are more accustomed to. What I dispute is that this is actually the case. How plausible, consistent or credible an established element of the fiction is has far more to do with the thought process around it than who established it or when they established it. Things decided in the moment are no more likely to be decided on a whim. I think describing the thought process behind scene framing decisions I make when running Apocalypse World as random or heedless is incredibly inaccurate.

Here I am not saying that such establishings made in AW or PbtA generally are random or heedless. In fact, I had in mind assertions about constraints on what can be said put forward by others in earlier threads. So, to be clear, AW would be an example of constrained establishings as compared with hypothetical random/heedless establishings.

So, I think there is absolutely a case that the ability to intuit what has been defined by a GM but not yet revealed can make for a compelling sort of gameplay you do not get in something like Apocalypse World, but it is a mistake to confuse that with the level of consistency or credibility of the shared fiction.

So far as I can make out, what you say is in agreement with what I laid out in my #581... or perhaps you can help me see the disagreements?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There was quite a bit talk about connecting the characters to the world, and this is a part of the reason why in D&D I want to curate species and classes, and I want classes to be concrete things that are diegetic rather than just arbitrary mechanical packages. For my world I designed several cultures and organisations that were the origins of certain classes and subclasses and I have limited list of species each of which has an established place in the world. Then by just choosing these basic D&D building blocks, alongside their background, the character already has some connection to the world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I've observed folk according such "justified" imagined facts a sense of greater legitimacy than those proposed heedless of validation or constraints. A common constraint is simply following from what has been said up to now. One method of validation is to adopt a normative principle that rejects "reaching". Another is of course to accord with familiar norms except where the game text has designed exceptions.

Likewise Meinong's gold mountain must have the property of <having some height or other>, but there is no particular number X such that it has the property of being X metres high.

Considering these two things... My approach to these sorts of ideas is to deny the entire Meinongian hypothesis at the start, and more relevantly that of @clearstream's proposal here as well. Meinong's Gold Mountain HAS NO HEIGHT, because 'to have a height' means it has a value, X, in meters, and lacking such an X, the property height cannot be said to be possessed by it. Since 'all mountains have a height', the Gold Mountain IS NOT A MOUNTAIN. Thus other attributes and entailments of 'mountainness' DO NOT APPLY TO IT.

The application to CS' argument is then straightforward, no imagined things have all the definite properties of real things, and thus cannot be classified as being members of the sets of those things. While that won't particularly serve as a guide to which fiction you 'should' imagine, it does serve one important purpose, it tells us that the possible fictions are only bound by pure aesthetic criteria and nothing else, no logical or other sorts of constraints are binding. I can imagine Meinong's Gold Mountain is INFINITELY high, not simply X meters high.

I won't say this all really effectively changes much, but by burning down all the crappy sheds of philosophic debate on an aesthetic topic, so to speak (with pardons to the philosophers) we can clear our thinking. What we imagine should be what it pleases us to imagine. All possible agendas and reasons for imagining things may be valid, but they are all equally justified or unjustified in any logical sense whatsoever. I think we already know this, so where are we now? We're at square one, where Edwards said he first got to the discussion and the immediate question he asked was "what are you trying to do?" There's no right or wrong answers to that, and no hard and fast list of what it is or isn't. Start there. All successful enterprise starts with this question, that's not a fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here I am not saying that such establishings made in AW or PbtA generally are random or heedless. In fact, I had in mind assertions about constraints on what can be said put forward by others in earlier threads. So, to be clear, AW would be an example of constrained establishings as compared with hypothetical random/heedless establishings.


So far as I can make out, what you say is in agreement with what I laid out in my #581... or perhaps you can help me see the disagreements?

Mmmm, at the danger of appearing to put anything in @Campbell's voice, I think this is all a lot more a hangover from vast numbers of threads where a certain faction of posters has beaten endlessly on this inconsistency, or 'lack of quality' drum. I'm not here to war with anyone but I'd be a rich man if I had a dime for every time I've been told it is impossible to arrive at a fiction which seems compelling and internally consistent EXCEPT by the process of laborious pre-authorship. How the exact measurement of the frontage of a building must be specified or else there's a terrible danger that somewhere down the road some player will unearth an inconsistency between that non-fact and some other world detail, and so on and so forth. I mean, obviously it extends into all aspects of the fiction, not just 'map details'. It is one of those tired points of contention where ultimately one side can argue endlessly that the other simply hasn't run into the problem yet, and the other side can only get so far that the first declares it all a matter of taste and seals themselves up in their motte.

In the end it is just better to talk about goals and techniques in a value-free sense, just as which things match up with each other. What goals match with which techniques, ephemera, etc. and then validate it all in practice, because theory is good in theory, but practice is good in practice. lol.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I can imagine Meinong's Gold Mountain is INFINITELY high, not simply X meters high.

I don't think you can. Not caring about the actual argument, but people cannot imagine infinite.