10 responses to ““Collaborative mode””

1. Well … I will get right to what I’m seeing. You’re identifying tyranny as a problem and solving it by democratizing everything. In my experience this can be euphoric at first, but it’s basically misguided and unless the real problem with the medium is addressed, then all the trouble will re-appear.

   Which is, effectively, the aesthetic history of almost anything labeled a “story game” from about 2005 through the present day. Even at its most functional, it’s consensual storytelling, or a writer’s room with momentary coherence or entertainment as its only standard, and crucially, it’s jumped media exactly into writing and not role-playing as such.

   [More common, unfortunately, is simply to spread the tyranny around in some way, or as I’ve said here and there, I don’t like being railroaded by one person, so why would I like being railroaded by five, with the dubious lollipop that I get to do it sometimes. But at least this doesn’t look like what you’re doing.]

   The authorities in role-playing, to use my language for it, may be distributed in any way. A wide or leveled distribution is fine, a concentrated or asymmetrical distribution is fine. The crucial point is that any single thing in the fiction may be “addressed” by them, plural. ….

   … I’d like to develop this into an explanation for where I see your description leaping away from the medium rather than doing it in a particular way. Unfortunately summarizing like this is extremely abstract and, as with any medium of expression, it makes no sense outside of examples, but every example must be a particular one with its own properties. Thus giving examples tends to fixate people on the properties of the instance and not on the point.

   That’s why we have 41 posts in the Authorities category, including discussions, and very little collective understanding at a practical level. I tried to get somewhere with In/Over, which may interest you. I’ve also developed a workshop about it which I hope to present in December.

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   • Thank you.

     Your response / analysis makes total sense to me. I don’t think what we are doing here is generalizable. My sense is that it relies on the fact that we are regular players used to each other, and part of the fun is passing the baton between ourselves as “this specific group of people who enjoy each other in the traditional GM experience as well and find it fun to just pass the ball in this format too”. And my euphoria is limited!

     I will check out the posts on authority. Reflecting more on this, the area I had been looking into in the past week are all the posts and videos around intuitive continuity / bang. I think that’s where I wonder what kind of experience we had. It does feel like “no prep / high control” (just shared), but there is also a piece that was interesting of the prologue and chapter 1 being a time of prep with little control for the main GM in chapter 2. I also want to try Circle of Hands, where it looks like you defined a really interesting way of approaching this.

   • In looking it over, I think I should have been more positive in terms of “this is indeed a functioning aesthetic activity,” at least in addition to the role-playing-centric “which happens not to be this activity” point.

   • No worries. I posted with the hope to have thoughts and reference to existing materials, which I did.

     I do have to say I did not follow the meaning of the back-end of your last post (specifically, at least in addition to the role-playing-centric “which happens not to be this activity” point). But that’s ok.

     The video “Rules, authorities, and PbtA” was super enlightening, in addition to the post you referred to, about the topic of authority.

     I have a bunch of questions / thoughts. But I want to take time to digest some of this first by playing more with it in mind. I find that the content around here gets clearer not necessarily by consuming more of it, but by playing after considering it. If that makes sense.

2. Not sure it’s very polite to respond one’s own post with another long post, but I’ll do it anyway… With a different point.

   Since this game and post, I have done another similar play, reflected some, read more materials, and viewed more videos.

   The question that I am asking myself is – did we implement a big machinery of “intuitive continuity”?

   The peril of “intuitive continuity” in this format is evident. The procedure consists in setting a “color” and then passing the baton of authority, without a solid preparation. It is therefore easy to just move from one narrative element to the next, intuitively, and without purpose – instead of answering a clear narrative premise (in the sense of Egri / “story now” if I understand correctly).

   So the question is whether there was a premise to start with… I think the answer is “yes”, with a caveat. Yes, because the “palette” was directive: corporate greed and fear as well as duplicity. Therefore, as horror arose, it would be corporate-driven, and for all the characters the question would become: is it inevitable to succumb to corporate greed or fear when it is pushed to the extreme? The caveat being the strength and clarity of that premise: we are far from the power of “love defies death” in Romeo and Juliet here…

   When we think of what happened in play with character development relative to that premise, we find three stories. The lawyer who stays true to corporate greed and ends up monetizing confidentiality. The conspiracist who stays true to his obsession, hurts the company and continues searching for the source. Perhaps the more interesting character is the engineer, who has everything to gain from protecting the company, but decides to go against it on his own principles at the end. In all cases, one could make the case that the story was made by these people in this group on that night, and others would have made a different story.

   The quality of the story construction is probably weakened by the fact that different characters had different conclusions to the same premise. That’s an effect of construction of our house rule: by stopping mid-game for each character to “state a purpose”, we do avoid a purposeless story, but we don’t reach a coherent response to the premise. Can we imagine a version of Romeo and Juliet in which Romeo kills himself, but Juliet wakes up and just says “oh, well, I’ll have to find another guy”…? Probably not.

   To note also that the premise of our other sessions may have been less clear than this one, which was not as crisp as it could have been in the first place.

   All good areas to reflect and improve upon. And The Pool will be our next play to try and experience a more intentional narrativist form of play.

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   • I think you’re going off the rails, or rather, into them.

     “Intentional narrativist …” “answering to a clear narrative premise …” this is all bad news. It’s the writers’ room. It’s analysis and pre-planning. It’s the story games disease of making widgets for enacting skits. I am starting to despair about how to talk with you, if this is where you’re going from what I’ve written, especially since I’ve seen it all before to the ruination of hundreds of would-be participants and their would-be games.

     Here’s a brief point: that the impressive-sounding term intuitive continuity is bullshit, as it merely puts lipstick on a deceptive and manipulative means of control at the table, the negation of play. It is not a method of play. It should not be taken literally according to its own vocabulary. There is nothing intuitive about it nor anything to do with continuity.

     Here’s another: my use of Egri was descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not talking about a technique of saying, “here’s our Premise, now we shall address it,” but an accurate observation that when anyone has made a story, this is what it looks like, regardless of their self-awareness and regardless of their method. I stopped referencing Egri twenty years ago, because I realized that doing so was ineffective and the communication was irrecoverably borked.

     I think I need to blowtorch your analytical intensity, including the firehose-drinking of vocabulary and the cross-referencing of multiple texts. I completely appreciate your desire to know role-playing, but I also think you’re trying to know it, i.e., master it, at the same time you’re trying to discover how to do it, which is a guaranteed tailspin for any substantive activity. (I’ll spare you my discussion of science, martial arts, and sex.) Your posts show all the table energy and imagination that you need actually to enjoy the basic act, when a certain amount of hobby cruft is finally shed. I can see the role-player trying to get out, as it were. The knowing can wait.

     I suggest two things. (1) Playing any role-playing game you like, for fun, without intensive critique and without seeking developmental insight. This is to establish a baseline of what you and the other participants enjoy doing, or even whether there is anything you enjoy doing, which I think there is, so that’s good.

     (2) Watching some play videos with notably straightforward content, in which intelligence takes care of itself and cleverness is absent. I suggest the RuneQuest game from a few years ago, beginning with Fast fun adventures with swords and magic underground.

     Beware as well of system enlightenment syndrome (I just made that up). So many people said, “Ah! And now we shall play The Pool and we will see the light!” … to the inevitable outcome of everyone bleating desperate or clever content into a void, or rolling dice because they think the system is coated with pixie dust and will give them a story, or both, meaning pounding incessant conflict into play. I put people through five weeks of exercises and homework just to get past this problem with The Pool. It takes some of them months and years later to finally realize that it’s just a role-playing system without remarkable distinction except for being no-bullshit and pretty good.

   • So I’m going to explain where I am coming from, and at the end you tell me what we do! I’m not giving up trying to talk with you unless you do. If this post is off-topic / distracting for the website, no worries if you take it down.

     I understand the advice of just playing. I have to disagree with the notion that practicing an activity without doing theory, from day one and in parallel of the activity, is effective. In fact, always combining theory + practice has served me extremely well in my life. (You actually make me ponder about my sex life… I have been practicing without theory for decades. I’m objectively not very good at it. I wonder if I should have picked up a book along the way…!) I can logistically play a substantial RPG session once a week, almost religiously. It’s 50 games a year. It’s as much as I would like. But it’s not nothing. I wouldn’t trade that game time for any amount of reading about RPG. But there are pockets of time in my evenings, and I dedicate a good chunk to reading fiction and also theory about my few activities. Also, in addition to being effective for me, reading theory / confronting it to practice / generally being analytical makes me happy in life. It’s a big part of who I am.

     Quick detour on three points you make.

     1. On Egri. I read it cover to cover. Personally, I think it’s a sham. As the saying goes: “if you can’t do, teach”. I speculate that the guy had a chip on his shoulder that the seminal work on the topic of fiction places Homer above Sophocles and Aristophanes. So he wrote a book largely paraphrasing and applying Poetics to playwriting, which is a particular case, and producing unnecessary nuances. It’s fine though. If we start disowning every book that paraphrases and dilutes the Greek and Roman classics, we can cut non-fiction book production by 80% (it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world by the way). I believe that his main point (which is Aristotle’s) is valid and largely unimproved in 2000 years: good drama is produced by character development as these characters face conflicts along a cogent plot line (my own English words, I have read Poetics in French). A number of film directors, screenwriters and writers I like seem to agree, for what it’s worth. Egri wants to use the word “premise”. And you have referred to it in the past, so be it. It’s still a good concept, and a fine test. And reflecting on that particular session, I was considering: did we fail in that session my own belief that a plot / premise / whatever term you use to translate the original word of “mythos” in Greek is required for a good story?

     2. On “intuitive continuity”. I think you are vastly under-estimating the validity of your own concept and the simplicity of its wording. I understand you use it to describe a type of GMing. I think that is a specific case of a broader one. What you are describing is, in my opinion, nothing more and nothing less than corpus-trained prompted content generation produced by neural networks — aka large-language models, as implemented in ChatGPT or your favorite conversational GenAI tool. (There are non-computational foundations to this in analytical semantics, but it’s less understandable that the GenAI analogy.) I really like the wording actually. “Intuitive” is a better word than “corpus-trained” and “continuity” is certainly a better word than “prompted content generation produced by neural networks”. My view of the RPG issue at stake with “story games” is that, from a language processing (and therefore story production) point of view, the GM (or a player) prompts his imagination to where he wants the story to go based on established narrative, and produces a next element based on an amorphous body of fiction he has seen / read. And we end up with highly derivative work from that process. The fact that this technique can be used by the GM to bend towards a desired outcome, or by the player to just move the story straight forward is not very important. The important piece to me is that doing this produces a bad story (and is not super fun after 2-3 times of doing it as a gamified procedure). For this reason, I am totally short on ChatGPT’s ability to produce a good story. And reflecting on that particular session, I was considering: did we fall into this trap of derivation, or did we produce original, creative, primary content?

     3. I have nothing to say about “enlightenment syndrome”. I agree with you. I have failed enough in my life that I rarely get exalted now, and definitely not about a game system. The Pool, playing “RAW” with an attention to procedure, is next to try and learn something from it, in practice and in theory. So is Inspecters. So will be the next edition of D&D. Sorcerer is on the list! So is Circle of Hands. Etc. For some of these I have a tough time absorbing the text and/or finding interested players. When I mange I try them. And if I like it, I’ll try to play them for a while. And if I don’t, I try learning something from it, in practice and in theory, and move on. It’s tough to find time for new games, because our group does enjoy the games we regularly play… And that matters more.

     Beyond this, my real angles about all of this are (i) logic, particularly propositional (various systems with an alphabet, rules of formulation, rules of derivation, tests of validity) applied to semantics (think Russell if you are familiar), and (ii) the nature of fiction (think Walton if you are familiar). Both of these fields are extremely well researched already. But how they intersect in what I would call “this weird thing that we do of getting around a table as a group with some rules to produce an ephemeral story” is not well understood at all… And I could go into my thoughts on that for hours, but that would be totally off-topic. (Quick example is how authority fits into the rules of derivation / test of validity framework of various formal logic systems, and what it tells us.)

     Now for the last bit. Why am I here? The French communities are high on theory, but I suspect some of these guys haven’t played a game in months actually and the “let’s smell our own farts and make one-page games nobody plays to pretend we are designers” attitude is not super appealing. I do like 1-2 of these guys and try to learn from them. The US popular community is lost in the shallowness of social media and the thought leaders have disappeared or, worse, been converted to Twitch commercialization. Adept Play seems to be the *only* English-speaking place in the world (I suspect there are great Italian, Nordic and German communities) where there is real play around a guy who has actually designed a classification model (I hope you are not offended by that qualification, but I don’t think the Big Model is particularly predictive) that still represents today’s “state-of-the-art” in the theory of practice and design of this activity. So aside from books, it’s the only place I seem to learn how to do better on Saturday night, and how to think better about the theory.

     That’s where I am coming from. But it’s *your* place, so you tell me what to do! I would totally accept disengaging, and just quietly reading / watching what’s going on on Adept Play (the website), and talking to myself about theory between my Saturday night games. I’m also happy to try to engage with you / this website / this community in a different way too. I came here to pursue my interests in practice *and* theory — trying to understand and use your vocabulary instead of my own felt more respectful and less distracting. But maybe there was the mistake in the first place.

   • Footnote first: I did not coin the term “intuitive continuity.” Gareth-Michael Skarka used it in his first published game texts, in the early 1990s. What he described and instructed was not play but a deceptive control method, and I use his term only for reference. I’m not using it for any functioning practices that bring new content in during play, which are no big deal or problem, and indeed several of my own designs rely on doing that. I’m using the term as he assigned it, as it’s the historical name for a vast swath of textual and practical harm to the activity at that time.

     Skarka is really just a blip, though. If you want the core text for this swath, it’s the Adventuring and Catacomb Guide, AD&D 2nd edtion, 1989.

     So please don’t try to “find the good” or interpret anything in these texts in any positive way, especially just because someone employed a catchy term. People have tried for decades and they only fall into the pit of control.

   • To the bigger point, your participation here is welcome, and obviously I can’t dictate how you want to frame it intellectually. Which sounds nice, but also, I’ve learned that if I coddle and support people without letting them know where I think they’ve spun out, then it only leads to suffering, and in recent years, I’ve found that speaking out has been vastly more positive than I would have imagined.

     So, to state my #1-2 better this time, if you want, then try my “play for fun” suggestion. If you want to analyze it, then at least this once, let’s try it afterwards, not during or injected or parallel. Therefore, I mean really afterwards, when you are saying, “Damn, this is really fun, I’m glad I’m doing this,” and possibly continuing.

3. Thank you Ron. I’m going to try your suggestion! I need to find a way to prep without overthinking now…

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