For the Gaming Theories

[jimhenley]

Via Tyler Cowern, Galen Strawson's "Against Narrativity." It's about cognition and ethics, not RPGs, but it has relevance to a lost current in RPG theory/advocacy discourse. Back before Forge theory collapsed the rgfa distinction between Dramatism and Simulationism, and for years took the former as the whole of the latter, and before critics of

Comments

[bryant]

Not entirely relevantly, that anti-narrative school is still around, just hanging out in different places. Nisarg lives and all.

[jimhenley]

I guess a lot of them (the self-styled "adventure gamers") count? Also a lot of the Old-School Renaissance people. But I don't think of either set as hardcore r.g.f.a simulationists. Am I wrong? I find TheRPGSite too unpleasant to even lurk at for very long, and my brief OSR infatuation passed when it sank in that, when all was said and done, this was D&D . . .

[bryant]

There's some pretty hardcore theory stuff going on. Justin Alexander's theory of dissociative mechanics is at least a stab in that direction. But it is theory in the service of criticism, for the most part. Which is something you could say of a lot of RPG theory, mind you

[bryant]

I like what you say about Dogs. One of the reasons that many (not all) of the indie games are a poor fit for me, is that all my best play experiences have been where "what the game is about" changed during play. Many of the indie games don't support that very well (others work just fine).

[nancylebov]

Here's a bit from an essay I've otherwise forgotten: "to bring in good things".

Killing a monk seems like a subliterary motivation, but it's one of the things fiction is for.

And there's a notion I've heard from very different sf authors that one of the functions of sf is to make dream images plausible.

One of my favorite good things scenes is from David Palmer's Emergence: riding a motorcycle across an alien landscape while telekinetically throwing lightning bolts at a dragon.

[jimhenley]

I like that: " to bring in good things."

I think there's a reasonable case that an Egri-style "premise" can be essential to a work's appeal, even if it's not something many writers use as a blueprint. I've sometimes joked about how every so often a gamer reads a single screenwriting book and creates a whole new theory of gaming, and we keept getting different theories because not every gamer reads the same book. But that said, Egri's not a fringe figure in scripting pedagogy. He was Woody Allen's favorite writing teacher at Columbia (I think, not Fordham or NYU or CCNY), and when I do a Google Books search, I find respectful references to him and his premise thesis right down to the most recent books on screenplay and novel writing.

But I'm temperamentally more in the Chandler/Zelazny school of winging it during the creation process. And in RPGs, the creation process is the whole of play. We don't go back and play a second draft of the same adventure, tightened up to bring the theme out better

[nancylebov]

Stephen King talked about writing the story first, then noticing the theme, then revising the story to heighten the theme.

[point5b]

We don't go back and play a second draft of the same adventure, tightened up to bring the theme out better.

Though the idea of "roughing out" the plot of an adventure in a broad strokes mechanic, then going back and playing various parts in detail (while trying to play those details to enhance or adjust the overall story) sounds, while not quite the same thing, vaguely interesting.

(Mind, that might just be Microscope used slightly differently.)

[agrumer]

I'm thinking that if you wanna poison a monk, there's gotta be an easier way to go about it than writing a long novel.

[agrumer]

Oh, hey, speaking of Diaspora, didja also notice how they took the designed-for-combat stress-damage mechanic and adapted it to a non-combat situation (buying stuff)?

More I think about it, the more it seems like Diaspora has two conflict systems (normal combat, social "combat"), and two bundled wargames (starship combat, platoon combat). The latter are so damn specific that it seems like it'd be tough to adapt them to other kinds of situations, but I suppose there may be extractable bits.

Hm, actually, the starship combat system can be thought of as something built out of the physical combat system (the ships have stress tracks and make attack and defense rolls), and the social conflict system (the "map" that abstracts 3D space plus delta-V, with border-crossing values and special conditions on the ends).

[jimhenley]

I didn't notice cause I've only really read the social-combat section, skimming just enough to make sure I understood their specific instantiation of Fate concepts used there. But I trust your account!

[agrumer]

The print version has examples, including a months-long political campaign.

[jimhenley]

Damn you, Grumer! I am trying to come off my recent Frantically Read One RPG Ruleset After Another jag, not find the next fix. ALL I wanted to do was get through the rest of Weapons of the Gods, by which point the Leverage RPG would be here, after which I could rest. That's ALL I wanted!

[agrumer]

Or maybe that just means A and B are different things than you thought they were.

[jimhenley]

Now you're getting macro on me, which I suppose is fair. But really, in my line of, er, avocation, A changes B at the micro level, and the reciprocal (B changes A) is just as good