We did it! This is about the authorities in play, which I put together both to form a single solid reference, and also to develop it past the basics and into practical use.
The title refers to the distinction between authority over people, which is often a source of fear and pushback against the word, vs. authority in play regarding aspects of fictional things, for which it’s exactly the right word, as discussed in the In/Over post from a couple of years ago.
Here we are in action, working through the details of situational authority with rules and concepts from the first version of Vampire: the Masquerade.
Other kinds of authority were similarly played/dissected, including:
- Backstory authority, using Dallas
- Outcome authority, using original or early RuneQuest
- Narration authority, using Lamentations of the Flame Princess
All the participants have the recordings and the in-class materials, including the slides. For everyone else, these things are available for purchase here. However, patrons! Be sure to get the discount code at the Patreon.
As usual, the days just following the workshop spawned immediate discussion at the course channel, included here so we may continue.
We also re-examined the older post Slaying the “The” as it relates to this material.
Jesse raised a point that I had to clip for time, regarding control. Why do I regard this terms distinction as substantive rather than semantic? Can one not say, “I control the room’s temperature” as synonymous with “I speak authoritatively regarding the room’s temperature?”
I maintain the difference is real: that control is always used to be at least negotiatory and even judicial, regarding the whole of a given thing in the fiction. That means that it’s impervious to whatever someone else might do or play about it, unless you agree – basically, you have vetting power over what others say … rendering whatever authorities they thought they had into mere table-talk, suggestions for you to consider. In other words, the essence of control is that despite its apparent reference to things in the fiction, it is really over the other people playing. It sequesters things rather than opens them up to multiple aspects being spoken for by multiple people.
I’ve reviewed some older work and found that July 23 Q&A includes some relevant presentation too.
In addition to participants, if you have watched the recordings, please contribute any thoughts, questions, reflections, and examples here.
9 responses to “Workshop: In/Over”
Claudio asked me a question at Discord:
I thought about it a bit more and realized something important. Unfortunately using “diegesis” has a critical misunderstanding built in.
In film, the perfect example is diegetic vs. non-diegetic music, which is super obvious and useful … but for us, the analogy isn’t 1:1. For us, both kinds of music are part of “the fiction” and in the sense I’m (mis-)using it, diegesis therefore includes both.
Sigh … it’s yet another attempt to find a familiar and useful term from other media which almost works but needs circles and arrows to be drawn in the air with it.
This is muddying the waters even more, perhaps. But would not ‘mimesis’ be the better term? In a broad sense, PLAY is an imitation of life, be it life in the 14th century or on Alderaan. At its core, PLAY is 99% in the imagination and the concepts only expressed through fictional actions or extra-fictional explanation and commentary. Even characters are only constructs that let us explore actions within the fiction.
I’ll stop now before I get too deep into it.
Responding in order backwards …
I agree with everything you wrote about play as such, I mean, the big notion of “play.” I like it a lot.
I don’t want to hunt for the right word, especially when they get more and more technical and rely on specific meanings inside specialized discussions.
Using “diegesis” at all seemed OK at the time. “The fiction,” as a term, sometimes causes trouble because it’s over-associated with specific other media as product. I thought, well, diegesis may be a fancy word but it’s not entirely unknown, and it’s pretty close to what we’re talking about. Going to “mimesis,” though … I can’t think of any way to use it that doesn’t immediately require footnotes and whatever clarifications are necessary when the inevitable incompatible details arise regarding the topic where it’s usually employed.
Therefore I’m inclined to take your first sentence as the right conclusion, about muddying waters. A few years ago I decided to stay with Anglo-Saxon English as much as possible, due to its cultural association with clarity. Using diegesis seemed like a mild violation of that plan, but I’m fearing it may have been a critical mistake and perhaps ruined the workshop’s utility in the wider world.
For anyone who’s interested: to an English speaker, if something said with mainly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary doesn’t make immediate sense or sound familiar, at least people are signaled to ask what it means. They feel it’s available for assessment. But Latin, Greek, or French roots have a lot of class-coded baggage in English, so if someone doesn’t see what you mean, the vocabulary triggers all sorts of suspicion and defiance. Or in some cases, it triggers status-seeking by diving toward further esoterica.
Here, among most participants at the site, the discussion is goal-oriented, and for participants in the workshop, I think the immediate goals and social functionality are in place. So if it were just us, then maybe “mimesis” would be a great option. If so, we’d use it entirely in the context of having experienced agreement about it, and knowing what questions were in place when we looked for a term. So I don’t object to the suggestion and as I said, I like the actual content you’ve described.
But it’s not just us. I want these workshops to be understandable resources “out there,” and above all, to deliver impact, a realization that play is in fact sensible and easy and honest, and that its systemic diversity is fundamental. In this, “diegesis” may have been a wrong step, and I dread the onslaught of arrivals who spy an opportunity to show off and will completely bury any merits of the content.
Lacking a good word for “fiction” in Italian, I’ve been guilty of using “diegesis” out of a perceived preciseness of the Greek. However, after speaking to a few friends that work in cinema, I came to a similar conclusion that it’s not the right word and might just cause people to parrot the word to appear smart.
I’ve now switched to using the most common-language expression I can, and clarifying as asked.
I wasn’t able to attend this workshop, but I purchased and listened to the first half of the recording today. To be frank, I went in expecting a ‘refresher’ on concepts I already had plenty of practical experience with. I am happy to report that instead, the first half of the workshop has opened up my perception of my roleplaying practice in a really exciting way. Like with my comments on the “No, Not Blackleaf!” workshop, I am going to share some miscellaneous reflections here to see if anyone’s interested in picking any of them up for further discussion.
In the discussion of Situational Authority, it was affirming to hear others highlighting moments of what Jesse termed “clarification.” I personally enjoy looking back at moments of play where clarification is done easily and unproblematically, knowing that in the toxic and controlling environments I used to play in this would have derailed the fiction or created threats to social status.
It is really interesting to watch the exercises, where each of the authorities is isolated for observation and practice. The first exercise in particular seems promising as an instruction tool for teaching the basics of the activity. It also made me want to be vigilant in my reading and watching of fiction for moments where ‘situational’ action is humming along without conflict or backstory, and functioning in an inspiring way. Even armed with the terminology from the excellent Situation & Story course, I would like to develop a richer internal sense of what I find to be good “where do you move next in the scene,” “who do you talk to next” types of actions, without reference to potential conflicts.
The game of Tunnels & Trolls I discuss in the “No, Not Blackleaf!” comment stream has been like an intensive bootcamp for focused situational authority. We’ve kept backstory to an absolute minimum, the better to focus on how our characters act toward each other and the world right now, in this moment only.
Next, the big one: examining Backstory Authority in detail made me realize that I have been confounding the creation of backstory content with the authority over backstory components. When I thought about backstory authority before this workshop, I was thinking in terms of “when one person gets to put a backstory component into play.” The correct definition is, “deciding if and if so, how a previously established backstory component matters right now.” Like the other authorities, it’s important that this authority is used in an un-prompted, self-motivated way.
This made me realize how we are continuously deploying backstory authority in the ordinary course of playing our characters, even in games where backstory content is minimal. To highlight a specific instance from the Tunnels & Trolls game: When a newly rolled Dwarf Warrior joins up, I get to decide whether our shared background in fighting goblins in horrible dark tunnels matters to my Dwarf Warrior, Skagga. If it does matter, I get to decide how. And that backstory component is ALWAYS available for me to play with as I’m inspired to by ongoing fictional events. I am not exaggerating when I say that this realization feels like suddenly being able to perceive a new band of the color spectrum. It adds a whole new dimension to my understanding of ordinary play.
As an audience-member, I found the second exercise to be simply enjoyable to listen to. Everyone did a great job of honoring the backstory and mutually playing with the simmering conflicts in every corner of the fiction. I think (I’m still considering this) that it highlighted an area for improvement in my own play of backstory components. I’m thinking about the games of TORG and Rolemaster I’ve played this year, both GMed by Rod. Both were complex in terms of situation and backdrop, generating a pretty high density of backstory components for multiple components of the immediate situation.
In both games, I played characters who were very concerned with understanding and acting from knowledge of backstory components. My tendency was to consult Rod for basic knowledge of the components, make tactical or strategic decisions based on that basic knowledge, and leave it at that. This isn’t a total failure of using backstory authority, but it does reflect my shallow notion of this authority. Once I ‘brought it in,’ I felt like my responsibility toward the backstory was done.
Seeing the workshop participants embrace the backstory components of Dallas and do creative, ironic, funny, sad, inspiring things with it makes me feel I should have seized the backstory components in TORG and Rolemaster more fiercely and used my backstory authority in a much more un-prompted way. I’m inspired to take this realization into my next game of Lace & Steel w/Rod.
I’ve tried to address this each time I’ve summarized the authorities, but it’s a tough nut to crack. The cultural history of play has landed us with a real folie à deux, or rather à however-many, among “saying it,” “making it up,” “controlling it,” and “playing it.” It’s related to my observation that many people have responded to The Pool with some hysteria in thinking that “gets to say it,” i.e., the literal act of speaking, necessarily means “gets to make up and introduce anything they want.”
I will amend your phrasing a little bit:
Specifically, that for purposes of the definition, it does not matter when the backstory component was created, nor by whom, as those are system details for whatever/however we are playing.
Since one possible rules concept is to combine making it up whole cloth and introducing it into the situation in that moment of play, I can see how it’s easy to confuse that compound with backstory authority. But only the second half is actually the authority in question, and the first half is a system/technique detail within it. (And merely to round out the point: the continued play of that thing concerning what it does right here and now is situational authority, not backstory.)
I recorded a conversation with Noah where we followed up on his observations. Well, and wandered down some side paths to do with my own preoccupations, but anyway, here it is:
https://youtu.be/uHzorhOyMDU
The video suggests to me that expression as such, by a given person, is one topic and the interface among several people doing it is another.
(Rod) In a game like these, the GM has immense content to consider, and as you point out, that includes thinking about how much will be present and active ino this situation. That’s the big distinction between my terms “backdrop” (cosmic war! a bunch of types of magic!) and situational “backstory.” While you were describing this, I thought that the GM might do well simply to go by their own interest in the matter and not concern themselves with finding some “not too little, not too much” ideal.
(Noah) You mentioned setting a bar for creativity and depth, which I winced at a little. It seems self-pressuring to me, as opposed to thinking about it more in terms of less pressure, by saying, instead of “what do I do?”, “oh look, here is all this stuff about my guy for me to do.”
I don’t think either of these is hard, although they are clearly skills to develop. I’m finding it harder to talk about the second point, about how these individual expressions interface among us during play, because it’s so wide open, so maybe that will be a topic for a specific play-experience later.
Rod, thanks for the conversation, it was helpful and inspiring for upcoming play!
Ron, one of the things that really helped me understand how fiction arises at the interface of multiple persons’ authorities was an example of situational authorities in action that you shared all the way back in People & Play. To paraphrase:
—Two players, one w/authority over a person-character, one w/authority over that character’s physical surroundings.
—Player 1: “You’re in a grasslands at the foot of a small mountain.”
—Player 2: “My character climbs the mountain, I want to reach the summit and look around.”
The point you made was that we only know Player 1’s situational authority over the mountain and the grasslands is in effect because Player 2 has taken it as a constraint on how they exercise their situational authority over the character. The fiction doesn’t happen when one player ‘speaks something into existence,’ it occurs when what they say is heard and authoritatively acted upon by the other people at the table.
I’d like to identify a similar moment of backstory authorities intersecting in the workshop exercise using the Dallas roleplaying game.
—Backstory Elements:
—[Ellie Ewing is in a proud, solid marriage established in oil-wealth, social status, and family advancement]
—[J.R. is Ellie’s son, deeply involved in Ewing Oil, the family business]
—[J.R. is in a muted marriage with Sue Ellen, who is isolated and concerned about their potential child due to J.R. being morally compromised or a high-functioning psychopath]
—[Mustafa Quattara is a representative of Arab oil magnates whom J.R. is hoping to con w/a fictitious industrial process for transforming petroleum to much more valuable ‘sweet crude’]
—Situational Elements:
—[Ellie, J.R. and Sue Ellen at the family ranch; Mustafa Quattara has shown up unexpectedly to discuss the deal w/J.R.]
—[Mustafa rather chauvinistically ignores Ellie and Sue Ellen and speaks exclusively to J.R.]
—[J.R. has just ‘suggested’ that Ellie go get tea for himself and Mustafa.]
—Player 3: “Ellie gets up to head to the kitchen. She catches Sue Ellen’s eye and motions for her to follow.”
—Player 4: “Sue Ellen puts her arm through her mother-in-law’s arm, we’ll go off to the kitchen to get tea for Mustafa and J.R.”
From an individual perspective, Player 3 has employed backstory authority to decide how Ellie’s position “in a proud, solid marriage established in wealth, status, and advancement” matters in this moment. Ellie is perhaps putting aside her personal sense of pride/status to play a role that smooths a tense social situation and advances the company’s interests, and she’s drawing on her status and past to encourage Sue Ellen to do the same.
Player 4 has had to decide how Player 3’s verbal contribution constrains what Sue Ellen does next: how do the backstory elements that Player 3 has brought forward matter to Sue Ellen right now? In addition, how does the backstory element of Sue Ellen’s marriage to J.R. matter right now? In this case, it seems that Sue Ellen acquiesces to Ellie, and possibly enjoys the opportunity to get a few minutes away from J.R. to spend with her mother-in-law.
A couple of things I notice at a functional level:
1) Player 3’s use of backstory authority creates real constraints for Player 4, as surely as, in the previous example, Player 1’s situating of the character “in a grasslands at the foot of a small mountain” did for Player 2. To consider a hypothetical example for a moment, imagine how different Player 4’s decision-making context would have been if Player 3 had employed backstory authority to say, “Ellie stands up and puts her hand out to shake Mustafa’s. She says, ‘Welcome to my ranch, Mr. Quattara. Why don’t I give you a tour of the place and then Sue Ellen can bring us tea on the back porch while you and my son tell me more about this deal.’”
2) Backstory elements and uses of backstory authority constrain but do not determine what others’ do with their authorities. For instance, we could punch up some of the potential conflict in J.R. and Sue Ellen’s marriage by saying “[J.R. is in a failing marriage with Sue Ellen, who is concerned about their potential child and alternately seeking ways to sabotage and escape the relationship.]” This wouldn’t mechanistically determine that Sue Ellen is going to refuse her mother-in-law’s hint and create trouble for J.R. It’s simply different material to work with, as if in the first example Player 1 had said, “You’re in a grasslands at the foot of a small but steep mountain. Near the summit the sides are practically sheer cliffs, but only 20 feet tall.” Whatever the particular qualities of the backstory, it is there for us to climb, walk around, studiously ignore, commence climbing and suddenly flee — exactly like the mountain.