Cogito, ergo ludo.

What matters

In my opinion (and this is definitely an opinion) what actually makes different gaming styles different is what the participants do. The core activities. This also means that I consider running a game and playing in one to usually be different games entirely; being good at one does not imply competence in the other.

I am specifically discussing about games in play; what the books say may or may not be tightly linked to this, assuming such books even exist. Some books are designed with very specific style of play in mind, while others are designed to be flexible (saying that one of these is inherently better than the other means that one is simplifying the issue).

Process of play

The way I think about this is to think about the play itself as a process. It is useful to also consider some activities that live on the fringe of the play, like campaign preparation, session preparation, character generation and note-taking, especially if the notes are shared.

It is also useful to treat certain subprocesses as distinct processes. This allows arbitrary accuracy by zooming on the interesting subprocesses, such as resolution and character generation and preparation, and ignore whatever is considered boring or obvious.

Example process: persistent fantasy

I’ll embrace the idea of subprocesses here. On the most abstract level that still carries some information, the process is

1. Design the game
2. Discover, create and compile a suitable random generator
3. Blog about steps 1 and 2.
4. Play a session.
5. Record the session, the characters, the setting and the list.
6. Go back to 4.

That is quite high-level. I think the fourth step could use a bit more analysis, so I’ll create another process chart for it.

1. Get a number of players to actually play the game.
2. Explain rules to any who are not familiar and want to know them before play.
3. Invoke the random generator (or reveal whatever has been generated in advance).
4. Note the characters that enter play because they are on the top of the list.
5. Generate remaining characters.
6. Build the starting situation.
7. Add characters to the situation.
8. Play.
9. Update characters that have changed.
10. Consider any feedback that is offered.

Here it would be possible to elaborate on a number of steps, but 8 probably is most in need of it.

1. Participants weave their characters and other fictional entities together.
2. Play produces complications.
3. Players use the fiction and the rules to mostly advocate the success of their characters.
4. Play produces complications.
5. Game master guides play so that the complications are resolved (if they are interesting) or ignored (if they are boring).
6. Complications are closed or are not immediate enough to demand being adjudicated in actual play.
7. End play.

The interesting part is that there are several different lenses that all provide different and often useful insight. Here’s another one, again on the subject of play.

1. Game master describes a scene. (Sometimes player, often everyone throws ideas around and GM integrates them).
2. The same is done to other characters that are not in any other scene, in arbitrary order.
3. Game master or player makes some situation dynamic; that is, some entity takes action.
4. Other participants react if something controlled by them is in the scene.
5. 3 and 4 continue until the scene ends, the GM takes the spotlight to another scene or there is a suitably strong conflict and dice get involved.
6. The ending scene happens.
7. End play.

Elaboration

Actually these processes do not work well in one dimension (line). A flowchart would be sufficient to cover most processes, though great detail might demand using the third dimension (more are never needed).

My gut reaction is that it is impossible to create a unique presentation for a game as a flowchart. The reason is that there are severa, congruent processes that feed on each other; for example, the scene-by-scene consideration and the complication-by-complication approach. Neither can be reduced to the other and even further breaking them down would not lead to same elements; a complication might happen and be resolved inside a scene, or might encompass several. Further, different players have different roles and adding all of these to a single chart could face similar problems. (I am unwilling to even try constructing anything resembling a formal proof, so all this handwaving must suffice. Please do disprove these musings if you can.)

Different ways of slicing play

These are all examples. The probability that I am missing something big and important is very close to 1.

The way fiction is created is one fruitful focus. It is closely tied to observing who adds to the fiction and how, which is where Forge theory is useful. Some generally useful steps include who frames scenes and how much do they define, can players assume details not mentioned by the GM and is character and setting background generated in play or before it (or after it). Other patterns are how detailed information is conveyed; long boxed text-like descriptions, or upon request, or not at all; and are very important elements lavished with detail.

The way spotlight moves around presents another interesting object. Who gets to actively play, how are different players handled, how does seating and such affect it all, and so forth.

I am most interested in the way the story is formed. Namely, what I called complications, but what could also be called story (or plot) threads or elements or seeds. For example, when a villain escapes, a new story thread is opened, as it is assumed that the villain does not simply disappear. The way these story threads are generated, intertwined and resolved is of great interest to me.

The way mechanical resources move around in play is worth some attention. Some games have very formalised ways of moving resources around, others far less so. On the formal side there are such games as Rune, D&D 3rd (and 4th even more so), Capes and Universalis. They benefit most from analysis on the resource level. Work on this subject has already been done by John Kirk in Design patterns of successful rpgs.

Formalisation?

All flowcharts can be analysed as graphs. Petri nets seem particularly interesting, but I’d have to read a lot more on those.

This post will be about techniques for accepting and influencing the inputs of other participants when roleplaying. Inspirations: Improvisation for roleplayers by Graham and an rpg.net thread by R00kie. Observant readers can see why I use exactly six different categories. I am sure they can be merged and more can be added if such are searched for.

Context

Say, I am running a random dungeoncrawl. A player character has discovered a secret passage to what seems to be a room full of treasure and wants to and grab some. The secret passage is quite crambed.

How can I react, as a GM? The process of picking which way I actually react may be a matter of rules (e.g. failed roll, no treasure; successful spell digs a tunnel), predetermined facts (the character is fat, no treasure; the character can pass through stone, easy entrance), on-the-fly setting creation (there’s a forcefield between you and the treasure; a minor earthquake opens up the passage), or by other means. That’s not the main focus here (not that I’ll keep quiet about it).

Blocking

“You can’t get through.” Blocking means that the input of the other participant is, for whatever reason, by whatever means, mande insignificant. As a general heuristic, one should avoid blocking. It slows everything down and disrupts flow of the game. Blocking is the way into boring failures when dice are not favouring the players.

here are some expections: The first is an idea that is totally out of synch with the rest of the game. A gritty and serious dungeoncrawl and someone is yelling Superman to widen up the entrance a bit. (Another common reaction is treating it as in-game sillyness. I’m not seeing the benefits of that, but won’t start yelling badwrongfun, either.)

The second situation that may merit blocking is when something has been established as futile, yet someone keeps trying. You really, really can’t get past that forcefield by hitting it with a club. Really. No, not even when raging. This is usually a case of communication failing between the participants and should be handled as such.

Shifting

“No, you don’t get inside the chamber, and further the dragon hears you.” The idea with what I’ll name shifting is that the previous outcome is not achieved and something else surpasses it in importance. This is what I used a lot in the Burning Wheel game (in context of someone failing a test). Basically, shifting is one interesting way to handle severe failures and setbacks. Not only does the attempted action or contribution to the fiction work, but also something else comes and grabs the attention.

Shift is something one might do when the game is running too slowly and some character screws something up, or other suitable situation occurs. More generally: Use a shift to change the pacing or other aspects of the game significantly. Like, “The orcs overwhelm you. You are standing there with a spear to your throat. The demon who leads the orcs walks through their ranks to face you.”, where an encounter with orcs does not lead to (immediate) character death and a potential BBEG (big bad evil guy) is introduced. Hectic combat is replaced with some probably hectic in-character dialogue and potential deals with demons. (Now I want to run that game. Damn.)

Opening

“You can’t get through, but there is this jar you just could tip over to make some noise (presuming that there is another entrance to the treasure trove and guardians in the place).” Opening still prevents the original intent from happening, but offers some other viable action or cause of play. Note the “offers”. Shift forces one instead of opening up new possibilities. Openings tend to slow down the game a bit, as people like to evaluate different options they have.

If running a game where the characters are not sticking together, open up opportunities for one player and move on to the next one. I wish I had figured this out and explicitly written down way before this. Using shifts in the same way may work as (mini-)cliffhangers, but killing the momentum is at least as likely.

Complicating

“You get through the passage, but a several guardian skeletons rise from the thrones they were sitting in.” Complication means that whatever was attempted actually worked, but so did something unanticipated and usually unwanted. Complication, like shift, changes the nature of the conflict, but tends to keep the goal fairly intact, which shift is likely to not do.

Complications are easy to introduce when some action is almost a success (or partial success or whatever), or when some minor mistake is done is some way. Complications often slow down the overall speed of events, but their effect on tension varies; use them as a pacing tool when something important is happening too fast to be enjoyable. “Your finger of death kills the BBEG, who barely manages to snap a wand in two. Red haze fills the room.” The action of the player is still relevant, but the climatic battle is just about to start.

Building

“You get to the treasure vault and of all the treasure a particular golden ring catches your attention.” Building means that whatever the other participant wanted to add to the game is now part of the fiction, and something that enhances the effect also happens. Interesting successes are situations where something is built. Building means that the goal, if any, is achieved, and yet something interesting happens. Run from the bandits and discover a hermit living the woods.

It is usually possible to ignore the new hooks that entered play, but it is considered bad form in some groups. It is essentially a way of blocking: “No, I don’t even touch or look at the ring.” In other groups the same behaviour might be called smart play.

Resolving

Where block is a clear No, resolution is a clear Yes. It is a closure, an end. A time to move towards other points of interest, or to end the game entirely. The trick is using resolution if and only if it is appropriate: Too rarely and the game bloats with new options, making it a huge mess full of unsolved events (I do this.); too often and the game will look episodical with only tenous connections between the different sessions or other instances of play. (If you enjoy episodic play, reduce the duration of the episodes until you are no longer interested, like so that every encounter is very much a discreet unit of play with little connection to anything resembling a setting or story.)

Larger scale

Assume that a given instance of play can be divided into scenes, each of which is fairly continuous with regards to characters, location and time. Ignore the scenes that are not interesting (for your particular definition of interesting), if any such exist.

The question is: How are the scenes linked together? This all is after-the-play reflection or even analysis, though may work as a preparation strategy, too. Particularly: How do scenes end and how do they start? My gut reaction is that if a lot of scenes end in resolution, the need for contrived plot hooks and the like is increased to keep the character engaged. Compare: Kill Kranach the raider lord, gather reward from the sheriff, enjoy the reward, spot a plot hook, grab it, go rescue a puppy from a cave. Alternatively: Kill Kranach and rescue the tiny girl at the same time. The girl asks you to go find her dog, which got lost in the nearby dark cave.

Not of the ninja variety. Note that this is an origin, not the origin.

The nature of turtling

When playing, most people want their character to do well, not be eaten by the grue, not be tortured by random demon lords, not lose all of their loved ones, not remain a dirt-poor loser and so on. The effect happens due to character identification or even immersion.

Turtling is the same thing, but taken to an unhealthy extreme. Namely, avoiding all sorts of risks to have the character be safe, where the category “risks” includes plot hooks and other story-making opportunities, as well as anything resembling a mystery.

Passing judgement

What follows is a description of a bad system. It can be worked around, but on system-level, the desired outputs fight each other, which is a bad thing. Playing in roleplaying is usually made enjoyable by at least two things: Interesting game, which usually requires that there are conflicts in the game, and identification with a character. The inherent conflict between these two is obvious. There are several ways to handle it.

One way is for players to always avoid all trouble, creating characters optimised to survive whatever happens to them and even triumph over such challenges. The character is practically untouchable. Not rarely have random green-skinned or undead creatures killed everyone the character ever loved and now the character’s life is only fueled by the desire to revenge them (and get rich in the process). The GM’s role is to challenge the character and engage it in something resembling a story. I call this a bad system. This is because the player wants to create a character who is actively hard to engage (in the long run), which makes the GM’s job harder, which is likely to reduce the quality of whatever story does manage to manifest, which usually reduces the player’s enjoyment.

Second way is that the player creates a character that is vulnerable in some way that helps the GM in engaging the character. The point is that any decent GM can see this flag and target the character there. This makes for less contrived stories as the need to use artificial plot hooks is reduced. Orcs killed your family, save for those of your age, whom they kidnapped, and you are out to discover and rescue them. This gives a plenty of material to the GM: Rescue missions, your sister who internalised to orcish culture, grabbed control of a tribe, and is now attacking the human lands, general orc slaughtering. All good fun. The downside, for the player, is that the GM might misuse the vulnerabilities of the character. Arbitrary killing those the character is about to save might provoke some interesting roleplay from certain players, but it is more likely to simply annoy. This I like very much.

Third way is to give the player a reward of some sort for hurting the character (often in specific way). Fate points (by whatever name) are the most common method, though others exist. This means that the player can both create interesting story material and play to the best outcome for the character, or at least not play to the worst. This often works.

The outlier methods are removing character identification or character ownership. Another is ignoring the story dimension entirely.

This is another highly abstract rambling about a highly abstract matter of systems, in no way limited to roleplaying, though still applied to them. You were warned.

Definition

My working definition for system is that it must have at least the following qualities:

• A means of input.
• An output.
• A process that uses the input to produce the output.

Trivial (and, hence, boring) systems are a legion. Some notable cases: Systems with fixed output are kind of boring. Systems where the input and output are independent (as in, knowing one tells nothing about the other; that is, they don’t affect each other) are random (or have fixed output).

As one can see, the concept is exceedingly broad. This is intentional.

The good, the bad and the aesthetically interesting

A system is well-designed (towards particular goal) if it produces the outputs that the goal says it should produce. Bad system produces outcomes contradictory with the goal. Elegant systems produce relevant outputs (with regards to the goal) and do so with as minimal a process as is possible.

A game of chess, for example, is a system. It has inputs (moving the playing pieces, social aspects), outputs (victory, defeat, draw, emotional responses of players) and processes (rules, the way humans work). The desired outputs are victory for one player, defeat to the other one, and an intellectually stimulating game for both. Draws are not a desired outcome but rather an annoying side effect of the rules. (Aside: It is also possible to build a strategy in chess such that the starting player will always win or a draw will happen; it is just so complicated nobody has done it yet, to my knowledge, but it is certainly possible.) Chess is not completely elegant: It has a number of rules for specific circumstances. One could argue that Go is as good as chess at its goals and more elegant, which would make Go a better game for someone with the stated goals (intellectual stimulation, determining a winner). Chess is still better for other goals, namely for learning to, say, play chess.

The voting system has the goal of finding out the opinion of people about (say) who should be in power and further giving those people the power. Personally, I’d vote for the Social democratic party and the Green party. I can’t vote for both. Hence, the system can’t take that information into consideration, which weakens it and biases it towards those already in power.

As it applies to roleplaying games

Roleplayers want different things out of their games. There are some things that most players don’t mind: Consistency of the fiction and of the rules and something resembling a story. (I am not saying that people always play for story or for consistency, but rather that they wouldn’t usually mind if the game remained as good in other aspects and had better story or was more consistent; the possibility of this is a different subject entirely.)

An elegant roleplaying game is one that has a set of design goals, is good for the kinds of gaming those include and has little material that is redundant to the design goals. Many Forge-games (as in, indie games coming from the community around or nearby the Forge) are elegant. This means that they are utterly focused. One can see this as a good or a bad point. Compare and contrast to euro games in boardgaming scene.

Clearly inelegant design methodology is the exception-based design one can see in D&D 3rd and MtG; in both, most cards/feats/class powers are exceptions of the general rules. Some like this, some dislike. Generally speaking, one can get a similar experience with a leaner design over a short period of time.

Good roleplaying games, bad roleplaying games

Elegance or inelegance, though loaded words, are not the grounds for saying that a particular system is bad or good (barring extremes). Personally I do prefer elegant systems, but that is my call.

I’d say an rpg is badly-designed in so far as the processes work against some of the goals. For example, if one assumes that the new World of Darkness core book is supposed to be used in investigative horror gaming, the specific combat feats merits seem to be bad design by encouraging combative characters and focusing attention there. (If one considers how WoD is likely to actually be played, they are not that bad a choice, after all.)

Given that choice is and important part of roleplaying, how do people make choices? There are useful theories out there (including game theory, with which I have a passing familiarity). I’ll try building another one so that it hopefully has something useful to say about roleplaying.

This model is specifically about how people make choices in the context of roleplay and that affect the rp. Extending the model is not particularly hard and is left as an exercise for the reader. The limitation is essentially arbitrary.

I also try out sketching a model for immersion as it is seen through this piece of theory. The threefold model is another example.

Some definitions

Filter is a criterion that assigns a weight to different options people have regarding their play. In case someone in the audience is mathematically inclined, a given filter is a mapping from the decision space (this is the emulation space [emspace] for those familiar with Kuma’s AGE model) to real line; generally speaking, the entire real line is not needed and one can work with a given interval or other subset.

Example filters: What would my character do? Will this result in total party kill? What will this say about me as a person? Is this appropriate to the genre?
Example filters for the more elaborate model: How much will everyone enjoy this? How genre-appropriate is this?

A filter is strong when it makes sharp contrasts between different options; likewise, a weak filter makes little difference. These are not exact definitions and should generally be used as a part of comparative phrases (they imply comparison to some unstated standard if not used in such a way).

A simple model

Every participant has a number of filters. Each filter accepts certain options and rejects others. In math: Filter is an indicator function of a subset of the decision space. It assigns value 1 to any option that is within the subset and 0 to any that is not.

When making a decision, participant applies filters, one at a time, with each application further restricting the possible choices (or at least not adding any). When the remaining options are sufficiently close to each other, the participant makes that choice. “Sufficiently” depends on how important the occasion is, how tired the person is, level of attention, and so forth.

The order filters are applied in is a matter of playing style and other influences.

Assumptions of this simple model

This is not a good model. It makes the following assumption (and others): That people always either reject or accept a given option; essentially, this model assume two-valued logic. This is not very accurate.

A more elaborate model

Filters work as above, expect that they can get values up to an arbitrary positive value on the real line (this can, but need not, be fixed). That is: A given filter assignes some value to all potential options the player has at a decision point (in nontrivial cases the assigned values differ from one option to the next). For desirable (according to that criterion) options, the value is high. For undesirable ones it is low. These are multiplied over all the used filters until one is sufficiently larger than the others. The option with highest value is then implemented and a choice is made.

Applications

Character immersion happens when player identifies with a character to great degree. Filter theory sees immersion as a process where the player has one or few very strong filters, so that it seems the player is not making choices at all. Typically this filter is “What does (would) my character do?”. This is clearly distinct from the disruptive behaviour sometimes known as “my guy-syndrome”, in which the relevant players uses the character’s actions as excuses for bad behaviour. In this model, players who disrupt the game and use the character as an excuse don’t make heavy use of the “what would my character do”-filter, but some other, more harmful, one.

The threefold model is a theory about filters. G, D and S all signify emphasis on given (family of) filters: dramatist GM has a strong “does this make a good story”-filter, for example. This is very explicitly not true of GNS: It is not about the way decisions are made, but rather what decisions are thought to be important, which certainly is prone to influencing the strength and priorisation of the filters that are used.

It will do little harm to think about the filters you use and of those that other people you game with use, and the order in which they are likely to be applied. Something might even be learned by such actions.

This post is about language. Tangentially related to roleplaying, more so in the end. I don’t have any training in the area, but meddling is fun, so…

There will be three examples used: Written English (you have probably heard of this one before), propositional logic (which can handle such phrases as “p and q if and only if q and p”, “if p, then q”, and usually has the operators not, and, or, if…then, if and only if) and a small indie RPG Risus by S. John Ross.

Defining a language

Language consists of four components: There is  a set of symbols (in case of spoken language, this would have something to do with the kinds of noise one can emit), a set of rules which define a grammar, a set of meanings and a set of relations that combine some meanings with some grammatically correct expressions.

English: Alphabet and other symbols used when writing constitute the set of symbols. Grammar tells that expressions such as “agonagasgjsegls” or  “write .ChA!oS” are not legal. The set of meanings is extremely large. The set of relations is even larger; it tells that such sentences as “Car is red.” can be used as a communication tool.

Propositional logic is an example of a formal language; notably, it is complete in that all grammatical expressions have a well-defined meaning. Set of symbols varies a bit, but may consist of between 2 and arbitrary number of operators and usually a countably infinite set of variables, like {c1, c2, …}. Parentheses are allowed (often). Propositional logic is severely limited, meaning-wise. A given variable can have two values (true or false). A given proposition (e.g. “c1 <=> (c2 or c1)”) may be a tautology (always true), a contradiction (never true) or neither (sometimes true, sometimes not). The relationship between propositions and truth is not terribly complicated, but also not worth writing down here.

Risus is an example of a supplemental language in that it builds upon a given natural language (English, for example) and needs one; it can have no meaning without a base language. Risus uses the symbology of natural languages. It adds new grammatically correct expressions, for example: Blogger (3) has well-defined meaning which involves rolling three dice in given situations.

Actually, I cheat

If I really wanted a good definition, it would have to be recursive so that, for example, words have meaning, words combined into sentences have meaning, and sentences that consitute a story have even more meaning, and so forth. It gets complicated and is not worth it.

Terminology

The scope of language is all the meanings it could have. Natural languages have large scope; formal logic usually does not.

Supplemental (with regards to a given purpose) language does not have sufficient scope to communicate whatever  the purpose would require. Roleplaying games are generally supplemental to natural languages. Computer games are usually do have sufficient scope to be played; MMORPGs may not.

Translation

Translation happens when one is given a (grammatically correct) list of symbols and should retain the meaning while changing the symbols, the grammar, or the relations.

Translations are problematic. There are several reason for this. First and most obvious is the difference in scopes languages can have. The canonical (but wrong) example is the number of words that inuits have for snow of different kinds. If it were true, it would certainly either be impossible or require an exceedingly long list of symbols to make a difference between them. Correct example are not hard to come up with: Propositional logic is an obvious example. It can’t make a difference between, say, “all humans are mortal” and “one human is immortal”, while natural languages and more advanced logical systems (such as predicate logic) can.

Another, though less obvious, problem occurs when symbols are changed. IIRC, Japanese have problems with “l” or “j” or some other letter that is common enough in where I live. If I asked, say, Nakano to write this blog in katakana or hiragana, he would have problems, even if only the symbols were changing. This problem gets really bad in languages where a given symbol means a given word (there is a fancy term for such languages).

I prefer to read books that have been translated through as few languages as possible. Also, reading a book in two languages or changing the language in the middle of a series can be surreal (I did exactly that with the Song of Ice and Fire).

Implications to roleplaying

Some people prefer to create characters in play, others at start, and this is not a true dichotomy. DIP and DAS the styles were called in the r.g.f.a. days, according to what I have heard. Assuming a player who is of the DAS type, that player first builds a character in her head and then tries to translate it to whatever system is being played. Conversions of whatever between games are similar. Some games make this very hard (Burning Wheel is notorios at this with the lifepaths; anything with random chargen likewise). Even the games that try allowing all options, like JAGS or Silvervine, make certain options difficult to impossible. They usually break when trying to create extremely powerful, small, large, or weak beings. Wushu and the like may be an exception in that they don’t make things impossible; rather, Wushu doesn’t tell enough about a character. (There are games that don’t have this “problem”, at least theoretically.)

An exercise for the reader. Two, actually.

Take two game systems that have sufficient detail and are sufficiently different. Try to convert a character from one to the other and see what happens. Try to recreate a fictional character in both and see what happens. Both exercises are pretty illuminating when it comes to what the game rules are about.

I spend this weekend prepping s person for the mathematics part of the matriculation examination. The student was a pretty smart guy, but he did not have much routine in twisting numbers and letters around.

I could not help noticing some parallels between teaching and running games.

The matter of preparation

When running a game, I have some possible events that I can confront the player characters with. Extensive planning is just work and encourages railroading (when done by me). I also learn the system well enough so that I don’t need to check the books that often, if at all.

When teaching, I had some ideas about what subjects to handle and possibly some specific problems to solve or tricks to show. I did not build a script of the teaching session. I did go through the MAOL formula book (contains most of the formulae used in the matriculation examination and can evn be used in said examination). I still have an excellent handle of almost all of the material, differential equations excluded. Maybe I’ll ask Thalin to give me a quick summary or alternative check out some literature. Anyway.  I familiarised myself with the “rules”. The parallels are clear, I hope.

The flow of the session

When running a game, I usually have prepared enough toget the thing going and then follow up with improvisation that springs from player choices and the dice. This leads to quite dynamic gameplay, but does have some drawbacks, too. One relevant strength is that I can change the direction or emphasis of the game based on player input, verbal or nonverbal. This would work a lot better if I actually noticed the nonverbal cues, as opposed to what I do now.

When teaching, I had something to start with (nested functions, understanding derivatives to be the rate of change or angle of a graph). I explained something from different angles until the Samuli, the student, understood what I was talking about. If a difficult problem came up, I constructed a series of problems so that it started with very simple and basic, every problem was a bit more complicated than the previous one, and the difficult situation was culmination of the series. The longest series was probably three or four, so nothing terribly elaborate. Likewise, if something was easy, we could skip past it and get on to the harder stuff.

The skills required

Roleplaying and game mastering are both skills. They can be learned, improved, or get rusty. Ditto with teaching.

I think the following skills are all central to both running a game and teaching, if interpreted sufficiently broadly:

• Gauging interest: Are people yawning or eager and focused?
• Building suitable obstacles/problems that are not trivial, yet are not too difficult.
• Clear communication: Explaining/describing things so that shared understanding of the subject matter/fiction is built. See anchors by Bruce (Tumac).
• Leaving room for the student/players: Teacher/GM knows more about the problem/obstacle than the student/players does/do. Yet, the student is the one who should solve the problem, and players the ones who deal with an obstacle. No use setting up a problem or obstacle and then solving it by yourself or having a GMPC solve all problems.
• Judgement: When a solution or mode of action is suggested, teacher/GM is the one who judges how well it works. Sometimes a simple mistake is done, sometimes the solution is flawless. GM does have the luxury of letting dice arbitrate some events, but even then the difficulty or modifiers of those rolls are up to the GM. (There are some games where this is not true. E.g. Primetime adventures, Beast hunters, Agon. This all IIRC; I have never played any of those.)
• Quick thinking. This one is obvious and general enough to not be worth extensive commentary.

Other styles

I had the luxury of only teaching a single person. This is good. It is very exhaustive. I’d say that teaching a group demands slower pace and is probably more conductive to  preparing. Reasoning: If everyone must understand a subject, more numerous angles of presentation are useful. It is often hard to improvise multiple ways of doing the same thing (at least for me it is). Hence, preparing them ahead of them is something between viable and necessary.

Does this apply to roleplaying? Does a larger number of players imply easier or more useful preparation?

In my experience (I have never run a game with many players; four is probably the upper limit), solo games move fast. It takes huge amounts of prep to not have to improvise in solo game. When there are many players, OOG chatter is more prominent, the characters interact with each other, and generally everything takes more time. This means that less content is used in the same time and hence preparation is more possible.

On the other hand, multiple player characters means more complex plans can be formulated and practically achieved. I’d say that the time planning takes means that adjudicating such is not a huge burden, as opposed to the rapid-fire approach a single player is likely to take.

Also, when there are several PCs, the material can be more generic, because nobody assumes that every moment of the game is relevant to every character in a very personal and intimate way. I hope.

Conclusions and a warning

There are clear parallels between teaching and game mastering. The different styles, prep-wise, are quite similar. (Sandbox play would be roughly equivalent to having a huge menu of problems for the studen to choose among; there is similarity between a textbook and a published setting).

The warning part: Don’t use roleplaying to teach a lesson. Like, “greed is teh evilness”. Punish every character that does a greedy thing, reward every generous action. Players will see it and resent it. Be open about such an undertone and add it as a setting or rules premise, like a setting where the generous are held in esteem and greed as a sign of possession by evil spirits. Let players challenge the notions and don’t fiat a conclusion you like. Provide a playground, not a brainwashing session.

This applies to teaching ethics, too. Teach something and people will resist it just because. Give something that people can interact with and they will form their own opinions about it and actually learn something.

Disclaimer

I have no training in pedagogy. Take my opinions with a grain of salt. They are opinions, not facts.

I am pretentious enough to call myself an rpg theorist, even with practically no formal training in anything related to roleplay. This even though I don’t actually write a lot of rpg theory, at least not of the hardcore model-building or academic-paper-citing variety. I think I am a pretty good critic. At least it is an activity I like and enjoy. With this all given, here are two models I have been helping with a bit:

RPG theory journey part five (there is a category for theory stuff) by Tumac, the author of the league of imaginary heroes, and Roberto Grassi’s attempt at unified model on rpg.net.

If you are interested in hobbyist rpg theory, do check out those two.

If you are developing a theory or designing a game and want some criticism (I won’t promise actual playtesting), I am here to be poked. Response time is not very quick right now due to studies keeping me more busy than they should and some other real life business.

Definition time. I’ll go for normative ones, even if they can be argued against.

I assume that rules are used, where rules are the perceived and accepted procedures of play. This includes such sentiments as “follow GM plot hooks”, “roll d20 and add skill, higher is better”, “all players can create facts about their own character’s homeland as long as GM okays the facts, which usually happens”. (For those who know system in Forge theory: This definition of rules has significant overlap with system in the Forge sense, but is not equivalent, and neither is a subset of the other.)

Resolution is using rules to determine diegetic (fictional) facts. This particularly means that there exists at least two different outcomes of the resolution such that they must have different implications as far as the fiction is considered. For example: Rolling attributes in D&D. Different results lead to different diegetic outcomes. A trivial example is GM narration, but it is also not very relevant to this blog post. I’ll talk about the non-trivial cases, in which some other factor is used to restrict narration or the fiction in general. Random encounters are a good example.

Fudging

Disclaimer: I don’t like fudging.

A participant (player or GM) fudges when resolution rules are used and their effect wrt the diegesis is ignored. Note: Player fudging is usually cheating, which I define a bit later.

For example: Player rolls a lousy set of attributes and rolls a new one and displaces the worst with it. It is worth noting that this is only fudging if it is not assumed in the group. GM rolls a random encounter, which is zombies, again, and uses skeletons instead. This, again, is fudging only if GM usually uses the encounter tables as is, with no need to alter the results afterwards. By this definition, it is not fudging to alter the mechanical statistics of entities mid-game, which might mean this is a bad definition. I’m not sure.

Cheating

Participant is cheating when some rules are used or are not used and the group does not approve of this, or would not approve if it knew.

Particularly: Game masters who fudge or alter statistics of NPCs or spontaneously swap the place of cities are cheating if and only if the players do not or would not accept it. If, on the other hand, the players assume or would accept such activity, it is not cheating (but may still be fudging). Almost all player fudging is cheating. In some games, GM fudging is also cheating. In others, not so much, but this still is a matter of the group.

Direct conclusions

Fudging is not inherently bad. Cheating often is. Not all fudging is cheating. Not all cheating is fudging (player reducing too few hit points is, but adding them during a calm moment is not).

Also, my definition of fudging doesn’t seem to work properly. It needs a bit more refinement, I think.

More theory-related non-dichotomies. Basically, something is validated in play if the it is accepted and engaged when playing. Something is challenged when it is engaged in play in such a way that it is questioned. I’m going to apply the definitions on the level of fiction and particularly characters, though social issues can also be analysed by the same methods.

Most, if not all, games have some portion of character validation in them. Thalin is GM in a Star Wars game that started this Monday in the university group and I am playing a jedi weaponsmaster. I want my character’s skill with weapons to be validated; thus far, there has been training of less experienced jedi and no truly challenging combats. I’m totally happy with that. On the other hand, the character has some dark side influence (which is not as huge a deal as in normal SW, because the setting is quite far from canon and set in the far future) and that is something I do want to be emphasised and challenged. I don’t know how far the character is willing to go if someone, say, mocks him or irritates him, though he is darker than I originally envisioned. Finding such things out would be interesting.

Alignment in D&D, particularly that of paladins, is also a great example. Some players and game masters want the paladin to be a knight in shiny armour, all good and just and so forth. This is, I believe, how paladins were intended to be played. At least this is the way the design points towards, with the extremely great price for falling (paladin becomes worth less than a fighter in combat) and the difficulty of becoming a blackguard unless that was intended from the start. Validating play supports the paladin; opportunities to be good, encouragement to do the good thing, maybe an opportunity to redeem a bad guy in a game not focused on combat.

Some game masters want to challenge the goodness of paladins. Some players want their paladins to be challenged thusly. Should orc babies be killed? A demon has possessed an innocent child, killing whom would banish it forever from this realm. How should one act in a hostage situation? The usual method is to put two goods against each other or make choosing one of two bads a necessity. In this model, the assumption that paladins are good is often put under microscope. Are they really the shining examplars they want to be? Is it even possible?

Both methods are, of course, totally valid. As with all theory and naming, one should be aware of the differences and find a suitable middle ground. Or an extreme view. Whichever. The problem with this issue is that conflicting assumptions can lead to play that is bad (not satisfying, in other words). A GM who wants to challenge the paladin and a player looking for validation can lead to perceived persecution, while player looking for challenging play and facing only validation will feel the game falls flat. This is true on characters not like paladins, but usually to a less dramatic effect.

Riddles and mysteries are another similar issue. I see absolutely no point in them, because that is not the way and the place to challenge me. Other players find them enjoyable. Mechanical challenges likewise: Attempts to challenge the mechanical aspect of a character are something I don’t find particularly interesting. Some play to be challenged in such a way.

I am fairly certain that a game where a lot of things are challenged would lead to more volatile play and one where the central parts of the game are validated would be more predictable, and hence easier to run in scripted way.