P H Lee

Further, somewhat technical thinking about the emotional resonance of different resolution subsystems in RPGs.

Elaborating on the point I made yesterday, I've been thinking with toy models about different approaches to resolution and which of those one should pick at any given time.

Imagine an RPG with a general task resolution system and two resolution subsystems, the canoodling subsystem and the gallumphing subsystem.

The general task resolution system goes like this: All rolls are opposed. When you make a check, roll a d20 and add your level. If you beat your opponent, you succeed.

Imagine two characters -- Alicenar and Bobnar -- in a conflict. Alicenar is level 3, Bobnar is level 7.

The odds of Alicenar beating Bobnar in a specific roll are ~6/20 = 30%.

Now, the subsystems:

The Canoodling subsystem works as follows: Both characters have noodles equal to their level. Each round of Canoodling, you roll against each other. The loser loses a noodle. When you're out of noodles, you've lost the canoodling conflict.

The Gallumphing subsystem works as follows: You make one roll to try to gallumph, which your opponent can try to stop. If you succeed, you've gallumphed. If you fail, you haven't gallumphed. You can try to galumph again, but you get a -1 to your roll for being uncreative.

Which of these subsystems is more attractive to Alicenar's player Alice? Which of these systems is more attractive to Bobnar's player Bob? Why? Which would you expect Alice to prefer to engage in, vs which would you expect Bob to prefer to engage in?

Let's consider another subsystem, let's call it the Taradiddling system. Instead of using opposed rolls, the Taradiddling system let's you roll on a table, modified again by your level. You roll 1d20 and add your level, and, while the results are somewhat nuanced, generally speaking anything about a 12 is good for you.

Again, same question. Which of the players is likely to prefer the Taradiddling system? Does that change as you level up?

Now, a last subsystem to consider: the Snickersnaking subsystem. The Snickersnaking subsystem isn't based on your level at all. It's just a flat "roll 11 or better and you've snickersnaked." Your target -- and snickersnaking does have a target -- can't do anything about it. Who is this useful for? Who should worry about it?

Of course, all these systems do have different results. Sometimes Alice is going to decide that, she'd rather be Canoodling than Snickersnaking, just because of the fictional situation that Alicenar is in. But the trade-offs of fictional result vs odds of success are, I think, something that we're weighing all the time (subconsciously or consciously) while playing role-playing games. I think it's worth looking at which forms of resolution have what emotional effects on the players, and steer players towards one decision or another.

Tearing paper, self hatred, and consensual violence in A Real Game and Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator

(I'm not going to be particularly explicit or personal in this essay, but it does talking about self hatred, body dysphoria, and kinky sex. So if you don't want to read that, don't read this.)

Paper folding and tearing is a regular motif in +Caitlynn Belle's games. I first came across it in Kirigami Dominatrix Simulator (KDS) where you simulate kinky sex acts by folding, tearing, and puncturing a sheet of paper, with tearing and puncturing being obvious metaphors for fairly violent sexual acts. To be clear: all of the sex in KDS is mutually consensual and positive for both / all parties. But it's also representing some fairly taboo, physically violent actions.

(This is an utterly brilliant design, by the way. if I ever need to role-play sex in a game, I am going to steal this technique and use it.)

So, going into A Real Game (ARG), that is how I understood the function of paper tearing.

And then A Real Game, in a fit of self loathing and textual dysphoria, asks me to tearing, stab, and fold it. And I paused. Because it seemed to me that this was very clearly an externalization of self-harm, and I didn't know if I wanted to participate in that or not. I didn't know if I trust the game (hahah I know, right, but the game does a very good job of establishing itself as a character) to know what reasonable limits were, or to not hate or blame me afterward.

And so, of course, I thought about kink.

The kink world is often portrayed like KDS: a bunch of happy, well-adjusted people who just so happen to have these particular deviant / fucked up sexual desires, and want to practice them in an ethical way with mutually respecting partners. And, while the kink world contains the same bullshit as any social circle, this is not a particularly unreasonable presentation. But it's also a very surface level presentation.

For some people, of course, that really is what it is. But for a lot of people, kink is a place where they are expressing their anger at themselves or at others, their hatred of their body or the bodies of others, their relationship to messed up gender power dynamics, their powerlessness and self loathing and impulses towards self-harm. This isn't a bad thing. In fact it can be a really good thing: it can be cathartic and healing. But it can also be re-opening or aggravating those wounds, or an excuse towards self-harm using others as the conduit.

I don't know whether the consensual violence in ARG is healthy or unhealthy (and, of course, the game is a fictional character and not a real person). But it certainly throws some scary flags, and it lifts the veil towards some of the other stuff that's going on in the context of kink, not part of the shiny happy outward projected image, but (what is for some people) the psychological core.

One of the most important things is that it gets away from the idea that the only thing that can go wrong with kink (or sex) is that it's non-consensual. Often we end up fencing ourselves into a libertarian ideological corner of "if there's consent it is necessarily okay." But people can make consensual mistakes, and can hurt themselves or others very badly in the process. The (paper based) violence in ARG is clearly consensual. The page itself is literally asking you to do it. But that doesn't necessarily mean its okay, and it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do, emotionally or personally.

That's really cool to see in a piece of media. It's critical in a real sense, unlike "kink critical" texts which are largely about dismissing kink as depraved or evil. In the context of KDS (and also Orgy in the Fens, which uses the paper-folding technique for sex), ARG's consensual violence raises the actual questions, difficulties, and rewards that (at least in my experience) come along with kink as a practice.

So, +Sarah Lynne Bowman wrote this article [1], and posted in a comment on my post [2] about comparing tabletop role-playing and improv, namely that they are not the same thing, and thus borrowing improv theory to describe role-playing is an intellectual dead-end.

It's worth reading +Tim Koppang's comment as well [3].

I think this is a very good article. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I think that there's some good insight there. That said, I'm going to start out by talking about some of my frustrations with the article.

My first frustration, which I gotta imagine is shared by the author and also basically everyone involved in studying role-playing, is the incredibly narrow range of literature on the topic, which results in a pretty myopic view of role-playing. Props for including more than just the standard set of Nordic LARP books, but, really, there's very little coherent theory work done outside of Nordic and Nordesque LARP circles. (The Forge [4], while it produced a lot of good theory about tabletop RPG, is neither coherent nor navigable.) This is frustrating to me simply because the article ends up discussing only one aesthetic of roleplaying games -- maximal immersion -- but, honestly, what other literature is there? Nonetheless, I think that this is the aesthetic of role-playing which overlaps the most with Johnstone's aesthetic of theater, and that creates an illusion of more overlap between the fields (role-playing games, acting) than actually exists.

I am also skeptical of the claim that LARPers are reporting their experience without being familiar with acting theory, particularly Johnstone. Johnstone has a ton of currency in LARP circles, and his ideology has already shaped a lot of the immersive ideals of LARP play. Even if a particular player hasn't read Impro, it seems very likely that someone in the non-Vampire, non-NERO based LARP community will be familiar with the ideals of his work, if by another name. Ultimately, the comparison is still pretty interesting, I'm just not sure if they can be claimed to be separate origins of the same thing.

I think the best insight of the article, at least to me, comes right at the end, from the discussion of dissociation and immersion. I think this is very insightful, and it strongly agrees with my personal experiences of both medicalized, psychologically disabled dissociation and also recreational, characterized, ludic dissociation. But I wonder if the category might be applied more broadly? It seems to me like all creative activity is dissociative, by which I mean, represents a cognitive break from reality. The exact nature of the break, and its purpose, and its relationship to the audience, are where the forms begin to differ.

Also, reading this made me very conscious of the aesthetic departures that most but not all tabletop roleplaying games have from the total immersion aesthetics of much LARP. I think the article does a very good job of drawing this distinction, even if, for whatever reasons, it really only investigates the total immersion aesthetic. It's sent me off on my own flight of fancy about aesthetics and games, which really belongs in another post.

Anyway, it's an extremely thought-provoking article and you all should read it and then write your own responses.

[1] http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation/
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/HSd2oWa6gNv
[3] https://plus.google.com/u/0/113060679603173178673/posts/gvGKZwMHLYw
[4] http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php

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So a term I use repeatedly in my last post [1] about +Sarah Lynne Bowman's article [2] is "aesthetics," which I do pretty much without explaining what the heck I mean. What I mean is, a set of artistic values that tell us what art is beautiful and what art is not beautiful. I think that there are pretty widely varied aesthetics in role-playing games, although for the most part we wouldn't necessarily use the term "beautiful" to describe it, preferring "fun," instead.

This dovetails with some thoughts I've been having about a conversation between +Caitlynn Belle and +Vincent Baker [3] on Vincent's blog a couple of weeks ago, about the narrow range of goals that currently exist in tabletop role-playing.

So, following on that and taking Murderous Ghosts as our example, there are a lot of different possible aesthetic goals for "explorer gets murdered by ghosts." Including, but not limited.
* Trying to succeed by avoiding ghost murder, at least for as long as possible.
* Telling a story about ghost murder.
* Experiencing ghost murder feelings and sensations and thoughts.
* Experiencing being an explorer in a dangerous, haunted situation.

These are all very different things, and they require very different games.

--

I don't think any sort of broad aesthetic taxonomy would be profitable (or, for me, possible) but I'd like to talk a little bit about personal history and my development as a designer.

Starting midstream in college, I was pretty heavily invested in the "we're going to tell a story by having a very strongly immersed character experience guided by a GM" school, which was very frustrating, because (particularly in large LARPs where there's less GM oversight) it's very hard to really get a satisfying story out of a bunch of dissociated people bouncing off of each other and, as one can expect, also a lot of interpersonal drama and hurt feelings. I felt like there must be a better way to get at story, but I wasn't sure how to do it. When I played games that let me write my own powers, I specifically gave my characters powers to alter and shape the story, trying to push things towards a more coherent narrative.

I was right in my intuitions: there was a better way. Riddle of Steel [4] is, I think, the first game that really did it right, building the story and emotional arc right into the character's stats (and it remains a great game if you can find a copy). Riddle's Spiritual Attributes aren't functions of the character's emotions or personality, they are literally aspects of the character's story arc. The idea that the story arc was something that could have actual mechanical [5] existence, rather than just a nebulous hand-waving, was a big fucking deal in terms of the aesthetic of story-telling.

But by the time I played Primetime Adventures [6] for the first time, I realized that this wasn't actually an aesthetic I could design towards. Mostly because PTA did it so extremely well and so extremely precisely, and it was very hard for me to design a "tell a story" game that wasn't just a minor variation on PTA.

There's another aesthetic hidden in that one, though, which was also something that harkened back to when I played D&D as an after-school program. When you draw back from the "immersion is the absolute good" school of aesthetics, choice becomes an extremely important aspect of play. Tabletop roleplaying games are unique in that the player can make an infinite number of choices, which can have an infinite number of consequences. Rather than trying to constrain this, as a lot of games do, we can instead blow it open, allowing as wide a degree of choice as possible. This massively informs Polaris [7] and a huge amount of my subsequent work (pretty much everything I've designed touches on this, but loosely, I'd say Polaris, The Drifter's Escape, Mud Dragon, and Amidst Endless Quiet embody the progression of my thoughts here).

This informs a lot about what I care about in play, which I would both call "immersive" (under some definitions) and as far away from possessive method acting as you can get. I am interested in what decisions the characters make (or, the players make for the characters, depending), and the context in which they make those decisions. I'm not particularly interested in watching someone portray this in any sort of realistic or realisticish style. I mean, if they choose to do that, that's fine, character-acting is a perfectly reasonable and sometimes very efficient form of communication, but what I really want to see is the choices that they make and try (although not necessarily succeed) to understand why they make them. For these games, for me, that's the thing that matters.

The games themselves vary widely on how the decisions are made, from "totally in-setting" in Amidst Endless Quiet to "totally based on the player's sense of humor" in Mud Dragon.

(Interestingly, I might paraphrase the Jamie Macdonald quote in Bowman's article as "immersive role-playing is beautiful to be, decisive role-playing is beautiful to do."

So, that's an aesthetic of mine. But lately I've been drifting somewhere else. I'm going to poke at it indirectly, but it's still not formed, so don't expect to understand what I'm getting at.

One of the things you notice when you watch a lot of people struggling with fictional decisions is that it matters. Yes, the immediate consequences are fictional, but the act of making a decision changes our identity and our personality, not in a short-term, split way like described in Bowman's article, but in a long-term integrative way. We come out of a game of (say) Thou Art But A Warrior as subtly different people than we went into it.

(I think this is true of all media and all conversations, and roleplaying games are both. But there is something particularly efficacious about roleplaying.)

This leads me to Beloved, a game which I wrote to teach myself to get over a break-up. This leads to other games, too. But I think I'm going to leave it there for now.

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/Ry3YkZDoZcr
[2] http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation/
[3] http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/834#19800
[4] A great game if you can find a copy.
[5] I mean this in the broadest possible sense. Don't interpret this as "rolling dice" or I will scream.
[6] http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/pta.html although if you can find the first edition I'd recommend that even more.
[7] http://tao-games.com/polaris

edit: physical -> fictional. A funny typo.

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More About Aesthetics and RPGs

It's funny, really, this chain of thought started with a post where I excoriated people for comparing role-playing games to theater, and now, in this post, I'm going to compare role-playing games to theater. So, for those sensitive to it, hypocrisy ahead.

One of the most influential books on my designs, and thoughts about aesthetics, is Zeami's On the Art of Noh Drama [1]. I haven't read the book in over a decade, so this post is going to be based on my recollections of the book after ten years of processing it in my head. So, don't take my word on what the text says, just take my word on how I've related to it for over a decade.

Zeami's Noh has a very clear aesthetic goal: to cause the viewer to attain Buddhist enlightenment: a realization that the world and its suffering is illusory and a subsequent detachment from all things. (I say "Zeami's Noh" because modern Noh has its own set of concerns which I can't speak to 100%.) The basic strategy, as I see it, is to tell the story of a character coming to enlightenment with the help of a supernatural (fictional) guide. This sets up a particular experience in the mind of the viewer but, when the story draws to a close, they understand that it is just a story, just an illusion and then, from there, that their own experiences is similarly illusory. Doing this requires a very precise performance. The story, characters, dance moves, music, and so on must be presented just so, otherwise the right mental state won't be evoked.

Obviously this is not something that works 100% of the time. But Zeami takes it very seriously. You will never see him saying that this is just a play, it's no big deal, etc. This is a big deal. Souls are on the line.

One thing which Zeami gets at in his text is his disdain for what he calls "role-playing." What he means by this is when actors try to realistically portray their character, to give the audience the feeling that that character is in the room. This is particularly troublesome for supernatural creatures. When portraying an ogre -- terrifying and violent -- don't be such a realistic ogre that people are genuinely terrified of violence. Someone who is in terror isn't in a state to have the experience of enlightenment, you've just increased their attachment to their physical bodies by creating animal emotions of flight and fear. Rather, you should portray an ogre just so that the watchers intuitively understand "yes, that is an ogre" without inciting the intense emotional experience of terror. Likewise, if you are portraying a fox spirit, as in, being seductive, you should not be seductive enough to cause lust in the audience, rather, you should be illustrate seductiveness so that the audience intuitively understands you are a fox spirit, but doesn't fall into baser emotions.

For me, this was a big deal, particularly in our movie-based culture which values realistic portrayal above all other forms of acting. It was the thing that made me realize, or at least, the thing that became emblematic of the idea that realism isn't an end unto itself. We should ask: what is the art trying to do, to its creator and its audience? And we should use whatever the most elegant tools are to get there. Sometimes that means not being realistic.

I think of this a lot, with respect to role-playing games. In my post yesterday [2], I talked about not being particularly interested in realistic portrayal of character of character emotions, and this ties into that. If a character is in a quandary, I'm not necessarily interested in watching myself or someone else play-act that quandary. Rather, I'm interested in understanding the quandary, understanding the choice the character makes, and attempting to understand why she made it.

Another important thing to me is the range and ambition of Zeami's aesthetic goals. The stakes of his Noh are not "more or less entertaining" but literally the salvation and enlightenment of the audience. It's not that Noh is not entertaining. It's that it's entertaining in service to those goals. That's a pretty ambitious thing for art to achieve but, if we take his word for it, it works at least some of the time. I think that's impressive and I think it sets a much wider range of possible aesthetic goals for our art than we usually let ourselves imagine.

[1] The version I read was Rimer's translation http://www.amazon.com/Art-Drama-Treatises-Princeton-Translations/dp/069110154X
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/doUwuLu8S85

So here's some things about games that I design and that I like. I like, and thus make, games that:

1) Escalate conflict. For whatever reason we got caught many years resolving conflicts instead of escalating them. But that's not how stories work; that's not how life works. Engaging fiction means engaging conflicts, so I want a game which will help push us towards making engaging, intense, escalating conflict situations.

2) About stuff that matters. For me this is sex, love, politics, culture, self, violence. But for you it might be something else. What's important is that the author is writing about stuff that matters to them and their audience.

3) Particular. The game has rules that matter (even if they go unused in a particular case) and generally only has rules that matter. The game is unique to its subject matter, author, and audience.

4) Fast. Not necessarily "short" but "fast." More time spent playing the important parts, less to no time spent not playing, or playing out trivial bullshit. If process interrupts play, it'd better be for a good reason (better still to integrate process entirely). If play is allowed to drag out into trivial bullshit, it'd better be enjoyable trivial bullshit.

5) Anti-narrative. I like stories ok. But what I really like is anti-stories, which don't end, which don't begin. Games are best when they give me an experience -- that is, something to tell stories about -- rather than a story itself.

6) Permanent. I like to play games with real stakes, for keeps. I want to come out of a game a different person than when I went in, in small ways or large ways. I want to know things about the people I play with -- including myself -- that I never knew before.

Not included is basic shit like the rules actually work and aren't socially toxic because Jesus Christ this isn't 1997.

You're conflating three things, here. This isn't surprising, since the conflation is going on in the "things I don't like" side of the equation -- it's often hard to parse out differences amongst things you don't like.

That said: Collaboration isn't the same thing as anti-destructive play isn't the same thing as consensus.

Collaboration: Anything where we're working together to build something. This includes, like, a great deal of role-playing games.

Anti-destructive: A set of creative collaboration rules which prohibits saying "no" or elsewise destroying, cancelling, or dismissing the contributions of others or yourself.

Consensus: A set of creative collaboration rules where everyone needs to agree to everything, usually in an unstructured form.

Do you follow all that?

My thought is that improv theater is anti-destructive, and a lot of improv-lusters have uncritically imported this techniques into RPGs under the banner of collaboration, without realizing that they're really shitty collaboration techniques for RPGs: They work well only in trained environments, with audience participation, for the joy of the audience and not the actors. Most people don't have an instinct for, say, not blocking, and it's a skill which really only comes with training -- rules can't get you there.

A lot of people who are hoping to improve collaboration as a reaction to previous abusive experiences with RPGs similarly turn to consensus as a form of collaboration, because it sells itself as a great way of no one getting hurt. I actually think that this is also a complete failure: "everyone has to sign off" is basically a mass invocation of the Czege principle, which robs games of their dramatic tension and often still results in hurt feelings, just slower acting and less justified hurt feelings.

But I'm still going to say, hey, collaborative games are really the way to go. At least for myself, all of my game designs are pretty aggressively collaborative, and even those that aren't (the Drifter's Escape) have strong collaborative elements. My point here is that collaboration is just about engaging with each other's contributions, and that anti-destructive rules and consensus processes are actually a very bad way to do this.

I think that a fruitful approach towards collaboration involves giving differentiated authority amongst the players, and then giving them goals which require interacting with realms outside their authority. Clover is probably the easiest example here: Clover's Dad has authority over the world, and Clover wants to, you know, do things and explore and so on. This means that Clover's player must constantly be engaging and reacting to the authoritative statements of the Clover's Dad player. In order to get what you want, you have to collaborate with the other player aggressively.

In a sense, competition is just a particular way of achieving this effect.

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Tim's response to me

Ben, I've read your post a couple of times now. I agree that I was a bit too fast and loose with the word, "collaboration." By in large I was using it to mean "consensus," but also to mean a lack of any external adversity. I am using "external adversity" to mean adversity that is generated by someone other than the active player, whether by the group as a whole or by the player himself. In order words, the Czege Principle.

Your point about anti-destructive play is an interesting one, and something that I hadn't really considered. I haven't seen many games that directly use the technique of not saying "no." Usually, when a designer imports improv techniques, he does so in a way that ends up resulting in consensus or pass the conch type play. It's to the point now where I associate improv techniques in roleplaying games with the removal of external adversity. Why designers continue to think this is a good idea, I don't know. I really don't. Play is often lackluster and flat when compared with games like Trollbabe, Polaris, etc., etc.

Now, I agree with you that most, actually probably all, roleplaying games rely on collaboration to one degree or another. I like collaborative games. I dislike consensus games. In my post, I was trying to set up the idea of a continuum. At the extreme, you have "fully collaborative" games, by which I really meant consensus or pass the conch games. Your terms are better.

I like the point you made on twitter about roleplaying being something different, not inferior to improv. Importing improv techniques is a mistake. Sure we can learn from improv, but less than some people seem to think.

The point I was trying to make in my post, however, was that it is easier to play a game that has more external adversity in it because it is easier to react to a threat than to play proactively or as part of a consensus-building team. I also think it is easier to play against adversity than it is to play a pass the conch game where you are put on the spot and expected to "tell a story" for your turn (e.g., Baron Munchhausen and Pickets & Blinds). In other words, some of the more traditional techniques are actually easier for new players to understand.

As a separate issue, we also have GM-full games. These require a higher degree of collaboration, I think, than games where the sense of adversity is stronger. A player is also expected to play more proactively. This proactive requirement, to make your character do things that he cares about without prompting from the GM, is more difficult for new players than some designers (myself included) seem to think. So again, I think this is something to keep in mind when designing a game for new players.

The push has been for (1) less external adversity, (2) more consensus-building, and (3) more proactive play as a means to bring in new players. I think this trend is a mistake. Many new players end up flailing in such an environment, or else find the experience uninspiring.