|
I finally read through +Vincent Baker's "Amazons," and it is really fantastic. There is a lot to think and talk about in terms of design, so this may seem a weird thing to focus on, but for some reason it really struck me.
One of the actions available to the World players is to "Have someone act." These are the rules for "choos[ing] someone's action": When someone's nature, interests, and sentiment align, have her act on them. Otherwise, you can have her act according to her nature, against her interests and sentiment; or else according to her interests and sentiment, against her nature. Those two rules for NPC actions are both insightful and powerful. They are one of those things that you know you know and that you recognize as soon as you see it but that you hadn't bothered to hammer into words before.
0 Comments
"Too many games create characters without thought to what they are. Characters are not really people; they are functional components of a game world which are manipulated by players to achieve goals. They are, in a word, tools. It is [during character creation] that you are attempting to guide the players into designing the right tools.
. . . If you guide the players into designing hammers, they're going to wind up with tools that are very good for hitting things; if you want them instead to write stories, you need to have them design pens. You need the right tool for the job; if you don't have it, there will be a tendency to try to make the job fit the tool." -M. Joseph Young, in "Applied Theory" "There are two aspects to rewards systems, both equally important. Many designers fail to realize this, and so design rewards systems that are internally conflicted--they encourage opposing play priorities. . . ." (from M. Joseph Young's "Applied Theory")
The first side of a reward system is answered by the question: "What does this reward, that is, what does a player have to do to receive the reward?" The second side is answered by the question: "What kind of play does this reward facilitate." If the actions rewarded and the actions facilitated by the rewards do not line up, then you have an incoherent reward system that muddles play. Young gives a great example of how these two halves of the equation can go wrong: "There is a clear example of this found in examining the popular experience points systems of games in which you kill monsters and get treasure, which gives you points, which raises your character level or skills, which makes you better able to kill monsters and get treasure. This is a coherent gamist rewards system: everything in it is geared to encourage the process of killing monsters and getting treasure, that is, overcoming the challenges of the game. It is a system that does not need repair, because it works extremely well at doing what it is supposed to do. However, there are many referees who don't like what it does. They think it encourages players to focus on killing monsters and getting treasure (which is correct, because that's exactly what it's supposed to do). They don't want that to be the focus of the game; they want to encourage role playing, or character development, or dialogue, or helping people, or any of uncounted other roleplay preferences. So they strip away at least some of the points gained for killing monsters and getting treasure, and instead give them for performing the desired conduct, whatever it is. Now a player character gains experience points by helping the poor, or pursuing his private hobbies; these points increase his level--which makes him better at killing monsters and getting treasure. The rewards are now given for one sort of play, but they still facilitate the other." "It must be asked whether it is necessary for characters to improve during play; the answer is that this is never necessary. . . . The more significant question is, in what sense can the character advance?
In discussing character generation, it was recognized that the character was a tool which the player used to achieve goals. Improving a character means making it into a better tool. Thus if a starting character in a gamist game is a rubber mallet, improvement might take it through stages of being a tack hammer, claw hammer, ball peen hammer, sledge hammer, jack hammer, and ultimately pile driver. That is, the character gets more effective at meeting the challenge, because it is a tool designed to meet challenges. If we consider the function of the narrativist character, we find that it exists to enable the player to address the theme, and as such it has to be tied in to the issues of play. Improving the character means connecting it more deeply or in new ways with the theme. It can mean deeper commitments, stronger relationships, more determined moral positions; it could also mean greater conflicts, increased doubts, more personal connections." --M. Joseph Young, from "Applied Theory" I’ve been thinking about this simple part of Apocalypse World’s rules. It’s listed at the end of the MC moves. And sure enough, every example in that section ends with that same question: what do you do?
“What do you do?” is of course a part of every game using the Apocalypse World engine, and at first it seemed to me like one of those “duh” moments. Of course you ask, “what do you do?” That’s what GM’s naturally do, isn’t it? Set it up and then let the characters react? It seemed so obvious, that I didn’t understand why the text made such a fuss over it. In AW’s Ludography section, Vincent notes: “The entire game design follows from ‘Narrativism: Story Now’ by Ron Edwards." I read that essay (and re-read it) in the last week and there is a lot of great stuff in it, as there is in all of the GNS essays. The heart of “Narrativism: Story Now” is the notion that for player characters to truly be the protagonists of the stories we tell, they need to be the ones in control of the story. They need to decide what goals are pursued. They need to decide what is important in their own arc. That is of course a very simple notion, but in a world of adventure modules and pre-made scenarios, it is uncommon, especially in 2003, but still so in 2010 when AW was first published and even today. In fact, Vincent makes it clear how a first session of AW is supposed to go. From that first poking around, the MC picks up on the threats to and interests of the characters. Then the MC can start flinging Threats and pushing the characters to see how they respond, never determining herself where the story should go, but using her moves to pose questions about the characters, who they are, what they want, and to what lengths they will go to get it. It’s in this context that “what do you do?” transforms from the mundane questioning of a GM going about her business into something more. “What do you do?” becomes a declaration of protagonism. It’s all about you (the character) and the actions you take, because through those actions, the character’s character will be revealed, and through that revelation, a meaningful story told. As the MC, I throw things at you so that we can all see what you do, and every time I make a move, I’m going to remind you who’s driving this story: “What do you do?” Every time I make a move, I’m going to remind you what defines this narrative: “What do you do?” It’s a tiny sentence that has a lot of weight and meaning tucked into it. ----- To which Ron Edwards replied: Credit goes to Amber for the first RPG text to do that. I got it from there for Sorcerer. "Railroading: Control of a player-character's decisions, or opportunities for decisions, by another person (not the player of the character) in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player. The term describes an interpretation of a social and creative outcome rather than any specific Technique." -Ron Edwards, from "The Provisional Glossary" I find this definition interesting because of the added detail "in any way which breaks the Social Contract for that group." So if was all sign up to be lead down a path (such as in so many published modules), then it is not railroading. ---- To which Ron Edwards Responded: RIght - we called the non-abusive form Participationist, +Mike Holmes' term, I think. It also raises the issue of the Black Curtain, which is to say, the convention to maintain that the controlling person isn't actually doing it. In Railroading, the Black Curtain is basically a lie; in Participationist play, it's a casual "why bother mentioning it" if it's there at all. ---
To which Mike Holmes responded: Yeah, presumably in Participationism players aren't interested in making certain sorts of decisions, namely (or typically) the sorts that drive events you would call the plot. Not railroading per Ron's definition, since nobody minds. The players usually still contribute something... like what their characters say, as the most common example we give. But it's often like, "Yes, let's merrily go down this one and only path that seems to be before us." The point being that what is considered the purview of the players and what is the purview of the GM can be any split of duties that is agreed to, and in fact this agreement happens in every game in some way. What's more, clearly some of these things are agreed to entirely tacitly (we'll just do it the GM's way, in many cases), and are often renegotiated on the spot in many games. Sometimes the players suddenly decide that they DO want to take control of plot decisions, for instance, and drive play in a new way. The question then is whether or not they've broken a contract, and if the GM tries to get them back on track. Put another way, often railroading comes about because the split isn't clear along these lines, with the GM assuming certain responsibilities for the majority of play, but with the players under the assumption that they can take responsibility and authority for making these decisions at any time... and are often chagrinned to find out that the GM feels otherwise and intends to use a big GM hammer to get that authority back. It is good design to make player options clear, and thus delineate well where the lines exist. D&D does this quite well, for instance. The GM is charged with creating an "adventure" in which the players agree to participate, but within the scope of that adventure, they have full authority to make the tactical twists and turns of the adventure go as they see fit, with the GM responding with the world in as though it were a simulation of "What would happen if they did X?" It was the tendency for such D&D play to not look much like a plot that caused designs to start emerging in the 80s that assumed that adventures would have plots, and the only way given to assure that the plot was followed/created (since this was not put on the players at all) was for the GM to pre-plan it all, and then use their authority to ensure it all happened as planned. Players used to having authority to make decisions during the course of play suddenly found themselves without many, if any, consequential decisions to make, and thus started to comment on this phenomenon of "railroading." My brain keeps exploding as I read through the theoretical pieces and positions put together by member of The Forge. So many smart people working together to hammer out what RPGs are and how they work—I know it’s old hat for some, but for me it’s amazing to behold.
M. Joseph Young summarized a lot of the thought collected on The Forge in his Theory 101 essays. If you care about this kind of thing and weren’t there when this was all being hashed out the first time, I highly recommend them (and Ron Edwards’s essays, of course--and everything they link to). Here’s a summary of what RPGs are and how they work from Young’s “Theory 101: System and the Shared Imagined Space” 1) The play of any RPG is the creation of a Shared Imagined Space. This is the thing that we create by communicating with each other: “[T]he game is able to proceed because there is a common understanding of what is happening, a shared agreement of the events of the game.” 2) The System of any RPG is what allows us to reach that “shared agreement.” As the Lumpley Principle holds, “System (including but not limited to ‘the rules’) is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.” 3) “What a System does, fundamentally, is apportion credibility. That is, it provides the participants with the means necessary to gauge who has the right to make what statements about the shared imagined space, and who does not.” Traditionally, of course, players have the right to say what their character does and says. We give credibility to what the player says about her own character. The GM is traditionally given credibility for whatever she says about the world, the NPCs, etc. “We call this credibility because we all agree to believe statements made by these participants when those statements are within the extent of their credibility.” And that’s it: “In the end, a role playing game is a conversation between a group of people in which they describe to each other certain imagined events that they create as they describe them. Everything else that we see as part of the game exists to support that activity, and to determine whose statements about what happens will be accepted by everyone.” “That is the most powerful secret of game design that has yet been uncovered, and to the degree that you can understand, support, and exploit this central concept, you can design or play a great game.” "The purpose of a roleplaying game's rules--any given rule, any individual rule in a roleplaying game--the purpose of that rule is to get the players to say or do something interesting. . . .
There are a million things that roleplaying rules do that are not to get the players to say something interesting, and those are bad rules." -Vincent Baker, in "How to Design a Roleplaying Game that Doesn't Suck" presentation at Ropecon 2013. Or, he adds, they can make what is said interesting. "My current kick is: a PC's decisions matter much more than her capabilities. You can see it quite clearly in this game.
"My long-standing kick is: mechanics exist only to apportion credibility, that is, whose word you have to take for what. Oldstyle games mechanics apportion credibility like this: the GM has to take your word for what your character tries to do, and you have to take the GM's word for everything else. To cover up this absurd and clearly dangerous power imbalance, the mechanics lie lie lie and claim to be about 'the physics of the game world' or some bogusness. "So this game, the mechanics are all and only about who gets to say what, and they're upfront about it." -Vincent Baker, 2002, in the "Notes, Theory, and Credit" section of Otherkind Cheap finds on Amazon lead to further first-hand exploration into the origins of modern RPGs!  "Social Contract and rules: This is where all those 'What is Role-playing' sections fall flat on their face. Just to pick the most glaring examples, I'm here to say that role-playing is not, and never was, 'cops and robbers with dice to resolve disputes.' Going by the model, people roll dice (or whatever) because they agree about the imagined events, not because they disagree."
- Ron Edwards in "The whole model - this is it" post on The Forge, 11/11/2003 In a post on The Forge titled "The whole model - this is it" (referring to the GNS model), Edwards has a neat analogy between RPG designers and musical composers:
"Design, when all is said and done, means authorship of a rules text. . . . As I now see it, rules texts are not and can never be "role-playing," but rather are recommendations regarding the model, if you will, in hopes (shared by the readers) that people who read it can get that version of the model into action. "Therefore the goal of design, it seems to me, is to make sense to the reader in terms of the whole model. It's like a musical instrument, or several of them, as well as instructions for how to play them, and finally some music or chords to work with." Just as a musician can sit down in front of a sheet of music and recreate a song she has never heard before, so a person who has never played a particular RPG before should be able to bring that game to the table from the text alone. The better written the score, the more closely the musician can reproduce the song, and the better written the text, the more closely the player can reproduce the gaming experience. And of course, there are elements of the song and game that are impossible to denote through the writing, so a musician might listen to another recording to pick up part of the spirit of the song that cannot put into words, and a player might find an Actual Play to pick up part of the spirit of the game that has evaded the designer's language. I'm a sucker for definitions. I love the way they lay everything out in a logical, succinct way. At the end of each of his essays dedicated to a specific style of play (Simulationism, Gamism, and Narrativism), Edwards provides a glossary of terms at issue. These are the definitions that concern Character Components from "Gamism: Step on Up": "Character Components: the features of a role-playing character. All are present for all characters, even if one or more is not explicitly part of the textual rules. See Effectiveness, Metagame, and Resource." "Effectiveness [as a Character Component]: any quantities used to determine success or extent of an action." "Metagame [as a Character Component]: all positioning and behavioral statements about the character, as well as player rights to override the existing Effectiveness rules." "Resource [as a Character Component]: any available usable pool upon which Effectiveness or Metagame mechanics may draw, or which are reduced to reflect harm to the character." ----
To which Ron Edwards responded: With the proviso, I hope, that these glossaries were works in progress the whole time, for use by a very limited number of people who were talking rapidly with one another and playing games a mile a minute. Nothing in them should be regarded as finished; they are best seen as handholds during a frenetic rock-climb, not as its pinnacle. Ron Edwards on Powergaming:
"This technique is all about ramping a system's Currency, Effectiveness, and reward systems into an exponential spiral. As a behavior, it can be applied to any system. . . . "Powergaming doesn't necessarily destroy the enjoyment of play, and . . . it may even remain functional in full-blown Hard Core form. Some Exploration may well be maintained, at least minimally, and the effectiveness-spiral might play a strategic role rather than to dominate fellow players. However, it's fair to say that powergaming is only functional if everyone is committed to it. . . . "To prevent powergaming, many game designers identify the GM as the ultimate and final rules-interpreter. It's not solution at all, though: (1) there's no way to enforce the enforcement, and (2) even if the group does buy into the 'GM is always right' decree, the GM is now empowered to Powergame over everyone else. . . . "Powergaming reveals vulnerable points in game design that are then Broken. Trying to prevent this one-two combination of behavior has led many game designers mistakenly to provide endless patch rules, full of exceptions to cover the exceptions, none of which accomplishes anything except to open up even more points of vulnerability." from "Gamism: Step On Up" At one point in "Gamism: Step On Up," Edwards notes that Gamist and Narrativist modes of play have a lot aspects of play. At the end of the list is this:
"Reward systems that reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever) rather than on in-game character logic or on conformity to a pre-stated plan of play." In games like Call of Cthulhu, your character advances are in terms of growth in skill and Sanity points. In D&D your character gets better at the stuff she does. All of the rewards are in terms of what your character gets in game. As a player, your reward is watching your character get better. In Apocalypse World and other Narrativist games, the rewards instead "reflect player choices (strategy, aesthetics, whatever)." When I chose a new move for my character, it is a decision about what I want to have happen in the story, what I want to see my character do not what I want my character to be like. Even the choice to improve my stats is about what I want my character to do (boosting my Weird to Open My Brain to the Psychic Maelstrom, or improving my Hot to have more fun manipulating folk). Not a distinction I had thought of before, but what a cool thing. Ron Edwards on d20 games: "I've concluded that d20 takes on a game-identity to the extent that a designer customizes Resolution, Currency, and Reward into a particular shape. Therefore to 'use d20' means one of the following: - to imitate or augment an existing form (supplemental materials for D&D3E) - fundamentally to write your own game (Mutants & Masterminds) - and I should mention some attempts at the latter which look more like the former (Star Wars d20, Spycraft) No wonder it's impossible to discuss d20 sensibly! There's no game there, not even a System. Therefore it passes out of the range of topics for this essay; d20 presents a fascinating economics and marketing phenomenon, but I think it's only meaningful in those terms." - from "Gamism: Step On Up" ---
To which Ron Edwards responded: These days I'm saying the same about Apocalypse World. Vincent does a thing with it, so does Nathan, especially, and a few of the other Apocalypse Engine authors. But too many of them don't - so they end up with ... character classes + a 2d6 resolution roll + a lot of frantic text to tell you how cool the Color is. Big whoop! Here's another set of definitions from the glossary of Ron Edwards's "Gamism: Step on Up":
"System (character creation, resolution including IIEE, reward system, metagame mechanics): the means by which imaginary events are established during play (see the Lumpley Principle)." "The Lumpley Principle: 'System (including but not limited to "the rules") is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.' The author of the principle is Vincent Baker." "IIEE: Intent, Initiation, Execution, and Effect--how actions and events in the imaginary game-world are resolved in terms of real-world announcement and imaginary order of occurrence." "Reward System: enjoyability payoff that prompts further play, usually expressed in Explorative terms but not restricted to Exploration." "Exploration: social and personal imagination, creation of fictional events through communicating among one another." Ron Edwards's essay on Gamism, "Gamism: Step On Up" is yet another interesting read with a lot of fantastic observations, insights, and assertions. It's a fraught topic, and I think he handles it with great skill.
He notes that Gamism "operates at two levels: the real, social people and the imaginative, in-game situation," and he labels the social goal is to "Step On Up" and the in-game situation as "Challenge." This division is, I think, especially insightful because each of the component parts are understandable by everyone, whether they identify as someone who seeks Gamist entertainment or not. And I find his explanation of the social dynamic of Gamism very evocative: "Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can very--for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. . . . This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing" (Edwards's emphasis). This definition reveals the Gamist in all of us since there is social risk involved in roleplaying to begin with. Every time someone plays the GM, they are hoping that they hold up their part of the story well enough so that everyone enjoys themselves, and there's something Gamist in that (unless you are of course simply forced to GM because no one else in your group will). That risk and that fear is part of what makes being a GM so fun and rewarding. Even in groups that love improv-style roleplaying, which would be the last place you might expect a Gamist play style to be enjoyed, there is a real pride that comes in contributing that perfect element to the story you are creating together. In some larger online communities of gaming, a player can even get a minor level of fame for being an excellent player. That desire to have that ranking isn't just pride, it's the enjoyment of that "performance with risk." I don't point that out to suggest any of those players are Gamist, but to show that that inclination is perfectly recognizable (and appreciable) even in people who don't actively seek Gamist play. The other excellent angle in Edwards' approach is pulling "competition" out of the definition of Gamism and making it a detachable variable, so that there is Gamism play with and without competition. I find it all very compelling. I began reading this essay because I wanted to read Edwards's essays in order before reaching "Narrativism: Story Now," knowing that that final essay relied on all this work that came before it--but I ended up really enjoying the essay as a thing unto itself. In "Gamism: Step On Up," Ron Edwards touches briefly on his theories about why a dedicated Gamist system did not naturally evolve in RPGs: "Discussing why such an overt, accessible, and functional brand of play did not act as a solid demand on the marketplace of game design must await more discussion of game-industry economics."
His quick answer is that "Gamism remained alive and well among computer games" and "let's not forget that card game that showed up at the game store counters a decade ago. I think that Magic: the Gathering is best described as a portable, customizable wargame--and that part of its popularity may be ascribed to the fact that customers of the day had never seen a wargame before. Unsurprisingly, a whole sector of people who were involved in role-playing suddenly discovered the hobby they'd been looking for." Edwards observes that games that strive for Simulationist play are easily drifted into Gamist play: "It also takes over easily mechanically in many instances of game design, especially in Simulationist-facilitating games, in two ways. The first way is to perceive system-based opportunities for advantage: breakpoints in point-allocation design, stacking of options into unique effects, and similar. Such things are often offered as neat add-ons in otherwise-Simulationist designs, but they take over fast when character niche-protection switches into literal character-defense. The second way, unsurprisingly, is through reward systems: a traditional character-improvement system can switch to a fully-social Step On Up reward system any time anyone wants, especially since it's self-perpetuating. . . .
The common reaction to this easy transition, for non-Gamist-inclined players, is pure terror - it's the Monsters from the Id! In-group conflicts over the issue have been repeated from group to group, game to game, throughout the entire history of the hobby. One such thing is a tug-of-war regarding following rules vs. not-following rules. What the rules actually say becomes yet another variable even as people argue about whether they should be followed, and when both of these issues are firing at once, nothing can possibly be resolved. The result is always to consider either following or ignoring rules to be 'right' when it goes your way. Another tack is for some groups and game designers to treat Gamism's easy 'in' as a necessary evil and to take an appeasement approach. The 'Id can be controlled, they say, as long as the Superego (the GM) stays firmly in charge and gives it occasional fights and a reward system based on improving effectiveness. This approach may rank among the most-commonly attempted yet least-successful tactic in all of game design. It will never actually work: the Lumpley Principle correctly places the rules and procedures of play at the mercy of the Social Contract, not the other way around. Therefore, even if such a game continues, it has this limping-along, gotta-put-up-with-Bob feel to it." GM as Superego to the Gamist Id is a pretty brilliant reading of that phenomenon. One last thought on simulationism before I move on to Edwards’s essay on Gamism. By Edwards’s definition, “Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play,” and those elements of Exploration are Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color. I wonder if there’s not a weird sixth element that is Dramatic Narrative. I know that sounds odd, since all games create Dramatic Narratives in their way, but then all games have the other elements as well.
What got me thinking this is the way that every RPG strives to reproduce some aspect of our world, lives, or experiences in a recognizable way. That is part of the pleasure of the game, after all. And while Vincent Baker eschews simulation of reality in his game mechanics, what he loves to create through his mechanics (and thus have them reliably and reproducibly) are moments of Dramatic Narrative. The most exciting example of this is the resolution system in Dogs in the Vineyard. The raises and stakes of any conflict will always reproduce the beat by beat exchanges that we see in excellent television and movies and read in excellent books. It’s the best mechanical representation of this dramatic structure that I have seen. Similarly, all of the moves in Apocalypse World, for both the PCs and MC, are built to recreate (again reliably and reproducibly) the Dramatic Narratives of great fiction. The MC’s moves are a collection of dramatic elements, challenging experiences that can (and should) befall the protagonists in this fiction (separate them; capture someone; take away their stuff; offer an opportunity, with or without a cost; etc.). The variation available to the MC to create softer or harder moves allows the drama to escalate rhythmically as it does in fiction’s other forms, with the mechanics making it so that softer moves occur much more frequently than harder moves, ensuring that those climactic moments are rarer. The division of the PCs’ moves means that sometimes the characters will get what they want, sometimes we will be surprised by how bad things go, and usually things will kind of go the characters’ way but further entangle them in the fiction. Through play, we as both players and audience, get to experience the narrative as though it were a dramatic show unfolding right in front of us. It’s an incredible piece of design Nothing else in Apocalypse World is designed to simulate “reality.” Everything in it is designed to emulate the stylized “reality” of fiction, written and visual. It is “simulationist” to the extent that it (and Dogs in the Vineyard) prioritizes our play in the Exploration of the Dramatic Narratives they create. Is that just a crazy notion +Vincent Baker & +Meguey Baker? --- To which Vincent Baker responded: You're absolutely right that Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World are designed to create dramatic narratives. My Big Model answer is, they work this way by working on the elements of exploration. Dramatic narrative isn't a sixth element of exploration, it's a higher-level phenomenon; it emerges from the patterned interactions of system, color, situation, etc. Same with modeling reality, same with any other structure you might choose to design into your game. To put it into Apocalypse World's back cover terms: System, color, character, setting, situation - these are what you've got, yes. What are you going to do with them? GNS goes on to propose that there are three coherent answers. Whether that's true or not, answering the question coherently is, I think, synonymous with rpg design. In “Simulationism: The Right to Dream,” Ron Edwards asserts that the heart of Simulationist play is internal causality: “Consider Character, Setting, and Situation—and now consider what happens to them, over time. In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. The way these elements tie together, as well as how they’re Colored, are intended to produce ‘genre’ in the general sense of the term, especially since the meaning or point is supposed to emerge without extra attention. It’s a tall order: the relationship is supposed to turn out a certain way or set of ways, since what goes on ‘ought’ to go on, based in internal logic instead of intrusive agenda” [emphasis his]. The “intrusive agenda” refers to the other goal of Simulationist play: the lack of “metagame intrusions” during play.
Because an RPG seeking to provide Simulationist play wants to cut down on “metagame intrusions,” according to Edwards, the games often have an “engine” that runs things. I found his discussion of engines in RPGs very interesting, especially since the only engine I hear referred to today is the Apocalypse World engine, and no one is accusing Apocalypse World of being Simulationist. (No one, that is, except me in a post late last night. I know well that Apocalypse World is the very embodiment of Narrativist design put into practice, but several things about the way the game creates reliable and reproducible narrative drama gave me the idea that to some extent Apocalypse World simulates the drama—and damn well!—that we see on TV, in movies, and in books.) Here’s what Edwards says: “Simulationist play can address very different things, ranging from a focus on characters' most deep-psychology processes, to a focus on the kinetic impact and physiological effects of weapons, to a focus on economic trends and politics, and more. . . . “[T]he mechanics-emphasis of the modelling system are also highly variable: it can [be] handled strictly verbally (Drama), through the agency of charts and arrows, or through the agency of dice/Fortune mechanics. Any combination of these or anything like them are fine; what matters is that within the system, causality is clear, handled without metagame intrusion and without confusion on anyone's part. That's why it's often referred to as ‘the engine,’ and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to ‘go.’ “The game engine, whatever it might be, is not to be messed with. It is causality among the five elements of play. Whether everyone has to get the engine in terms of its functions varies among games and among groups, but recognizing its authority as the causal agent is a big part of play. (To repeat, the engine's extent and detail aren't the point; I could be talking about a notecard of brief ‘stay in character’ requirements or a 300-page set of probability charts.)” There’s a lot here that puts me in mind of the Apocalypse World engine (by which I specifically mean “moves” and the narrative directions they create from the die roll). For example, “the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to the authoritative motive force for the game to ‘go.’” That is entirely true for Apocalypse World—the engine dictates movement and direction in ways that are out of the MC’s hands. Of course the MC can decide how hard or soft a move to make on a miss, and there are certainly metagame concerns at work throughout the game, but the results of a move are the law. You don’t reroll it or fudge the numbers; both the MC and the PCs have to live with the results. The move of Apocalypse World, as Edwards says, “is causality,” only the aspect of play being affected is not the “reality” of the world but the dramatic narrative of the world, and “recognizing its authority as the causal agent is a big part of play.” This is what led me to posit that Apocalypse world might be Simulationist to the extent that its engine consistently creates dramatic narrative that can feel like its own end. What it is simulating, in other words, is not “reality” but the dramatic structures of other art forms (books, movies, TV, etc.). In his response to my post, Vincent Baker cleared up what I was misunderstanding when I asked if narrative drama might not be a sixth element of Exploration. He said, and I’m rearranging his words here though maintaining their meaning: The modeling of reality in RPGs is a higher-level phenomenon that emerges from the patterned interactions of system, color, situation, etc. Go ahead and read that again, because it is powerful. As a quick follow up observation, here’s another passage from Edwards that comes right after the long passage I quoted above: “Many Simulationist systems also emphasize modularity - you've got the baseline engine for what happens, so for specialty phenomena, whatever new rules go on top must not violate or devalue that baseline. When a system is very strong in this regard, it's what most people call ‘universal’ or ‘generic,’ by which they mean customizable through addition.” The Apocalypse World engine is neither universal or generic, but it is incredibly modular, and we are seeing from all the hacks of the system that we have “the baseline engine for what happens” and that it is endlessly “customizable through addition.” In “Simulationism: The Right to Dream,” Ron Edwards talks about how in Simulationist games (as he defined them) character-creation itself is often part of play, and occasionally setting-creation is as well.
Again, this got me thinking of Apocalypse World. I have heard and read many times how RPers love the low/no-prep of starting an Apocalypse World game; you just get your friends together and watch it all come together. That aspect of the game is often pitched as an end in itself. What that actually means is that what was once work for the GM has been turned into play for all, like wine from water. When we say that an RPG is no-prep, what that means (ideally, I think) is that character, setting, and situation itself are all part of play. That’s a bitchin’ bit of design work. Sometimes when MCing an game using the Apocalypse World engine I find myself reaching for some sort of difficulty scale like a limb I had removed long ago but from which I still feel an itch.
Difficulty scales and target numbers for tasks is a hangover from traditional games, and are simulationist in nature, acting as a mechanic to replicate the notion that some things are easier to do than others. Vincent and Meguey of course junked that in their efforts to create an entirely narrativist game. And once I started looking at all the things I love in Apocalypse World, I see all the conscious rejections of anything that can be tied to the simulationist traditions. A rolled initiative? Screw that. Keeping tracks of money? Abstract the fuck out of that. Experience points? Check these boxes when you use the things that make your character awesome. Advancement? Here are more awesome things that you can do, so choose where you want the narrative to go and pick it. Hit points? Ha! What’s that weapon’s range? Far. Deal with it. Every aspect of traditional games has been given an abstraction or turned into a narrative moment. Any time the dice are rolled, it’s the narrative that’s going to be affected. God damn! That’s why it has changed RPGs like it has. "Points of Contact: The steps of rules-consultation, either in the text or internally, per unit of established imaginary content. This is not the same as the long-standing debate between Rules-light and Rules-heavy systems; either low or high Points of Contact systems can rely on strict rules."
-Ron Edwards, form "Simulationism: The Right to Dream" |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
April 2023
Categories |
RSS Feed