New Site

So the long promised move and update is finally done.

From now on Yudhishthira's Dice is here.

It's also been merged with Random Encounters, so they are now one blog. More material from Space and Death games, including Church and State 2nd, Crime and Punishment, and 1000 Stories will soon have their own pages at games.spaceanddeath.com as well.

Comments are Open

Okay, if you have comments about "Guess Who's Back" do em here.

Guess Who's Back, Back Again?

Brand is back, tell a friend.

Ottawa was lovely. Now I'm back, and this is the post in which I'm going to be dealing with a lot of the issues that you noisy monkeys have brought up in the 4 days that I was out of town. You'd think I'd been gone a month, not a piddly little half-week, with the volume of discourse you've all been generating. Oy.

So here are my thoughts and responses. It's long and long, but please actually read the whole damn thing before you start to respond, or else I'm going to get cranky really fast.

Also note that I'm going to be moding conversation on this thread for at least a few days, and limiting comments to specific folks. I don't want to talk about this as fast as fast can be, I want everyone to actually take some time to think and formulate and feel confident and safe about what they're saying. The break-neck speed that we use in our discourse on the net is a lovely thing for getting energy up and building networks, but it is lousy, lousy, lousy, for people actually getting to understand what others are saying.

So, here we go:

Push and Pull vs. DitM and DatE

My current thoughts on this one are that Vincent's takes on DitM and DatE are all good ones, and do relate directly to push and pull and the moment of crisis in a very real way. They are also, for the moment, the parts of push and pull that I want to look at.

However, I don't think that DitM/DatE is all of push and pull. If you look at the history of the discussion of P/P you'll see that there are a lot of different levels being looked at. Jess Pease in here 20x20 Room article was looking at them as two possible modes of interaction (out of possibly many) in the greater social sphere. Mo and Chris in their Deep in the Game discussion looked at them as techniques to be used in game in order to move the game in a direction. This is a much narrower definition than Jess's – but it doesn't negate Jess's, it just focuses it down another level. Similarly my moment of crisis was another step down from Mo's definitions from the Deep in the Game thread. Now Vincent's ideas about DitM/DatE are the newest narrowing and tightening of scope.

To be specific, at this moment with DitM/DatE we seem to be mostly concerned with technical issues and how those effect game play. P/P did this too, though probably less directly stated, but P/P was also concerned with emotional and social issues and how those effect game play. DitM/DatE hasn't gotten to talking about that yet. Not that it won't, in time, but it isn't yet because we're just getting started and are looking at the process of how things work. In time we may get to talking about how those processes contribute to the social and emotional resonance of game, but we're not there yet.

So if you're looking at DitM/DatE and P/P and saying, "I can see how they're related but they don't feel the same" there is a good reason for that – DitM/DatE is just starting to explore on area and figure out how to use it mechanically and technically. That gives talk about it a very different tenor than talk about the whole of P/P and the emotional investment/social construction angle. So if your intuitive objections come down to "well, maybe, but I don't think it feels the same" then you could well be right. It doesn't feel the same because it isn't 100% the same discussion, its an exploration of a new direction that came out of the old discussion.

So it is very likely that there will be much more to talk about with regards to P/P than the DitM/DatE discussion. However, for now I want to table that so that we can focus on the DitM/DatE line of enquiry and work it out and figure out how to use it in play and design to maximum potential. Once we've gotten somewhere with that, then we can come back and look at other issues under the bigger umbrella as seems useful or fun. I will talk about why this is causing some disconnect later in this essay, but I don't want that to be the point – I'm just going to offer it up in way of explanation under the Digression header below. That's just to see if I can't help people get on the same page, and not because I want to get back into the whole issue of what P/P are and every nuance of their being.

Seriously, I mean it. Especially because a lot of people seem to get it intuitively, and just have trouble talking about it. I'm really hoping that when they start seeing some technical system issues that gradually build into social and emotional agenda issues they'll be able to start putting names to their intuition. (Though even if they can't, I'm not too worried. I've talked with several people already who, though they have a hard time isolating if "this specific little nit here" is push or pull or ItM/AtE already know the basic ways of using it in game, and that's fully cool. It's only really the hard-core designers who need to know huge amounts more than that.)

Also, I'd like to note that I've been talking about what Push and Pull are for six months now, and like Mo I'm healthily tired of the endless talk about "if this particular close to the line example is push or if it's pull and what are push and pull anyway." I want to move on now and start looking at things they do in game and how to use them, and DitM/DatE is something that does just that. Maybe as this develops the new angles we figure out and the new games that come out of it will help people twig to the rest in time. (Like how I didn't really get Nar until I played Dust Devils and went "OMG!") Maybe it will lead to something completely new. Either way its something cool that came out of the conversation, and I'd like to be able to talk about it rather than the same things for another 6 months.

So, on with DitM/DatE and the issue of resolution.

Resolution, you tricky bastard

We all know what resolution means, right? Well good, because I don't. Or that is, I thought I did until Vincent and Ben exploded my head. Now, in terms of this whole issue and things Ben and Vincent have been talking about, I've been forced to reconsider some things.

To explain why, lets look at some issues, shall we? Won't that be fun?

The Stakes Example

In stakes resolution you resolve a conflict by setting up stakes and then using a method of resolution (usually framed as fortune – the dice) to decide what happens from those stakes. So you make stakes about an issue, you consult the oracle, and you get a resolution.

Example: If Jon makes this roll then Mo will write commentary for his new magazine. If Jon fails the roll then Mo will never speak to him again.

Seems simple enough, right? We've got stakes, and now we're heading towards resolution.

But, um, from where did we get those stakes? Did they magically appear out of the air? Did Jon say them, in exactly that manner? Did Mo? Did Jon say what he gets if he wins and Mo say what she gets if Jon loses? Did I, the GM in this little drama, get to modify either or both of their statements? Did the other people in the group? Did Jon start off by saying, "If I win you'll co-write When the Forms Exhaust the Variety with me" and then get negotiated down to the commentary angle? Did Mo start off by saying "If I win, I'll kill you, you bastard" and then get negotiated down to just not speaking to him again if she wins?

Here's the thing: by the time we get to resolving the stakes, we've already had to resolve something – the stakes themselves. We've had to, as a group, come up with what we want the stakes we're going to resolve to be. Some games may give one person the authority to just say the stakes and have them stick. In some games the whole group may have to agree that the stakes are good, and even non-participating parties can mess with them. The way we, as a group, get down to actually making the final stakes for the stakes resolution is, in itself, a resolution.

Judd has often come onto stakes and conflict resolution threads and given good advice. One of the best pieces is to make stakes that lead to goodness if they are won or if they are lost. In this view the group should set it up so that if Mo comments or if Mo never speaks to Jon again it will drive the story forward. Is it just me, or does it sounds like using group Drama resolution at the social level to set the stakes? If that's true, by the time we're whipping out the fortune to say if Mo is going to speak to Jonathan again or not, we've already used Drama resolution to set up stakes that we find interesting.

If I, as GM, had the ability to set those stakes myself and no one else could say anything once they were set, is that DatE of the issue of setting stakes? If I could suggest stakes (or others could) but the final stakes didn't get set until we all agreed what was most dramatic and fitting, is that DitM of setting stakes? By the time we get to resolving what's going on in the fiction, haven't we already had to have some resolution at a meta-level?

The IIEE Example

Okay, the thing is not all games use stakes resolution, especially not in the way I was talking about above. (Polaris doesn't even come close, for an easy example.) But what about IIEE? Oh that lovely IIEE. It will make our lives in this discussion even more fun and interesting.

Vincent recently talked about IIEE and how it relates to ItM/AtE, and said, "IIEE is about what happens in the fiction, ItM/AtE is what the players actually do at the table." That is true, and I do not dispute that. What I will say is that the matrix of how they work together can be a lot more complicated than one ItM/AtE exchange determining the whole IIEE.

We all know that a game can have separate steps for resolving different parts of IIEE. The classic example is rolling to hit and rolling to damage in D&D. You roll to hit to see if you can execute the "I hit him" action, and roll to damage to see how much effect it has. You can succeed or fail at either step along the way. That's a nice easy example.

The thing is, once you get into it, the examples don't stay easy for long. That's because at each stage of IIEE you can have a different resolution for that stage, depending on the system of your game. So, you could do something like this (using one, multiple, or all of these for check points for blocking/rollback/authority):

Intent: You get to say what your intent is, once you've said it no one else has anything to say. That's Push/At the End.

Initiation: You have to negotiate with someone else to actually start the action, even when you've said you're starting, other people can still modify it or cancel it by choosing not to buy-in. That's Pull/In the Middle.

Execution: Once you've started it, you may then have the ability to say how it goes until it hits the moment of effect. Your narration is thus Push/At the End.

Effect: You could then have to stop and negotiate with others to see, now that the action is done, what the effects of its completion are. That's back to Pull/In the Middle.

To make it worse, you may be able to use different types of resolution as well. You could use (probably normally do, in fact) Drama to determine the intent, karma to determine the initiation, fortune to determine the execution, and drama again to determine the effect. Like this:

Intent: You roll against a chart to see what the NPC's intent is (fortune)

Initiation: You have them go about that intent in a way that seems the most likely to cause conflict (drama)

Execution: You play cards against the PCs to see if the NPC can do what they want (fortune)

Effect: Having succeeded or failed at your execution, you now narrate what happens based on how well you think the others responded to your challenge (karma)

At this point we're starting to make a matrix, a big list of choices for things that can be combined and recombined to make that process of working through IIEE work very differently in different systems. Who has authority at which level of IIEE to say what? Is their say the end of it, or only the start of the negotiation? When do they use dice? When do they use drama? At what point is it even an issue? You can make a game, I'm sure, that always goes right to effect. (I don't know if it would be a fun game, but I didn't claim that either.) At that point things get simpler, but not necessarily for the best.

In Nine Worlds, for example, you use drama to set up your stakes and intents and then (depending on how you have framed it) use fortune to determine who has narration rights, and then that person gets to use DatE to determine initiation, execution, and effect. (Though I've noticed that most NW's APs I've seen never have the narrator stop the initiation of the other person's effort – they just stop them before they get their desired effect. It's an interesting social gambit, don't you think?)

OTOH, in Sorcerer you frame up your intent dramatically, roll the dice and start playing to see if you ever get to execute (Ron's talk about how in Sorcerer you may not get to have an action every round goes here – we assume that we should get an attempt to execute every pass, but that isn't how all games work), and after the dice are done use part mechanics (damage, currency, etc) and part narration to decide what the dice actually mean in terms of effect.

Then, combine that with the stakes issue from up above, and you start getting a "resolution tree" rather than a simple resolution. Every time we go about resolving something in game, we're really resolving a whole host of tightly interconnected issues.

(Also, it's probably worth noting the ways in which Intent and Stakes framing work together, but that's a different issue.)

So, um, when are things actually resolved?

So, if you have a resolution for stakes, or a resolution for II that then leads into another resolution for E and then another for the E after it, and one of them is something in the middle and two of them are something at the end, when the hell does something actually happen?

Well, lets look at Polaris. With Polaris you can get into a scene without specific preset stakes (in fact, you usually will), have people go back and forth in multiple turns of adding, modifying, negating, and doing things in the middle. Some things will get resolved as you go – a big stack of "but only ifs" for example, may all come to pass in the fiction when someone else pulls an "and furthermore." But even then the resolution of the whole conflict isn't over until you hit an end phrase. When that end phrase comes up, you get your final resolution. Be this fortune at the end ("It Shall Not Come To Pass") or Drama at the end ("And that Was How It Happened') you know you've hit the end and the whole unit of conflict is resolved because you've gotten your end phrase.

I think there are probably invisible end phrases at the end of a lot of resolution trees. Much as it can be confusing to think about the multiple levels of resolution that may go into deciding a conflict, we all know when we get to the end – it's when the thing at hand is finally decided. Once the conflict has been staged, with all the resolutions needed to stage it, and then acted out, with all those resolutions, and then finalized, with all those resolutions – you're done. Now lather, rinse, repeat.

Okay, so how can pushing me off a roof be pull?

One of the issues I've seen brought up over and over is how can something like "I push you off the roof" be pull? Isn't it something that demands a response?

The answer is, and I want you all to say this out loud, IT DEPENDS ON THE SOCIAL SITUATION AT THE TABLE WHEN THE STATEMENT IS MADE.

Okay, maybe I need to calm down and stop shouting. Let me back up here and address something that a lot of people have been having issues with, and see if I can clarify it in a very brief way. In communication theory one of the very basic models of how communication works is that you say something, the other person hears something, and the aggregate of those things is the communication. So if you say something meaning "Come to dinner on Friday" and I hear "come to dinner on Friday" then the communication was "come to dinner on Friday." But if you say something meaning "Come to dinner on Friday" and I hear "Come to lunch tomorrow" then the communication is a mess of signals that involves you and me having an indeterminate meal at an indeterminate time. It's the thing in between the intent of the speaker and the perception of the listener that is where communication happens (or doesn't happen).

Push and pull work much the same way, they take up the middle space between what you intend to do and what the other person thinks you are doing. You can intend to push, and if I know that you're pushing then the push can go through. You can intend to pull, and if I know you're pulling, then the pull can go through. But if you go to push, I think it’s a pull, and start treating it like something to be negotiated over, we've gone into muddle land. Most of the time this probably gets resolved by whoever has the better ability to argue/coerce/convince/plead coercing the interaction into the type they wanted it to be. So you could intend to push, I could intend to pull, and we could end up pulling or pushing depending on who gets their way in the end. (We'll also probably both be unhappy.) Thus if you're my GM and say "It's raining" and mean "I am saying it is raining, that is said and done don't argue" and I say, "It would be better if it is clear and sunny" and mean "I want to modify what you said because I think you want my input now" then we get into issues. If you force it over me anyway, then it stays pull. If I get you to mod it, then your push got subverted. As with communication it’s the thing in the middle, the thing we end up communicating, that is where push and pull sit.

Luckily for us this does hook up with the resolution theory pretty well. If you think that you're getting to do DatE and say something, and I think that you're going to DitM and try to mod what you've just said… we end up with issues. If we have a good social contract and/or explicit system to fall back on then we can use that system to figure out what we are doing and why. If we don't, we'll end up in the same muddle as above – with the one of us that can finagle the best getting it out over the other guy. Knowing what you are doing, what the other person is doing, and who has rights to do which is thus key to keeping things flowing smoothly. So at that level being able to have system/social contract that says "we can push/DatE in situations t, u, and v; but must pull/DitM at situations w, x, and y" is just making sure we're on the same page and doing the same thing so we have fewer miscommunications and abuses of those miscommunications.

Thus all the confusion over "is it push or pull because I say it or because the other person perceives it" is missing the point. It is both, and neither. What you intend matters, what they perceive matters, but what the social dynamic/resolution method of the game ends up actually being because of the fusion of intent/reception/and social force is what determines if it was a push or a pull.

So, given everything I've said above, lets consider a game where you cannot even finalize your character's intent (first I in IIEE) until you have the approval of other players AND everyone at the table knows that explicitly. At that point we've got an In the Middle for resolving Intent. You say, "I push you off the roof." But, every single one of us at the table knows that you aren't doing any such thing. In fact, what you're really saying is, "Can my character want to push yours off the roof?" Because until you're done with the system for resolving intent, you haven't even gotten the authority to want to do anything ICly yet. You don't have authority to push me off the roof, or even have you character want to push me off the roof, until I've bought into it or had a say about it. Because you have to get my buy in before it happens, then it must be….

I chose this example on purpose, because most of us are used to games in which our intents, and the intents of our characters, are fully under our authority. Much as someone may be able to stop us from executing the push over the roof, they can't stop us from saying that our character wants to. But, if even intent is something that must be done ITM, then you can't even form an intent as a final action until after others have had a shot at it.

OTOH, if you have the authority to say "My character wants to push your character off the roof" then you've made a push/ATE at the intent level. Once you've said that is what your character wants, there ain't nothing I can do about it. However, even then we now know that is only one part, and that it can still get turned into a pull/ITM at the Initiation level with any number of responses.

Digression

However, I think that here we also are seeing another issue with the current discussion and why people have a hard time seeing the connection between P/P and DitM/DatE – because one dealt with a lot of issues, including the emotional resonance of the action, and the other is focusing very specifically on the systemic expression of the resolution. To put it in bastardized Forgese, DitM/DatE are dealing with things at the level of technical agenda and large parts of P/P were dealing with things at the level of social/emotional agenda. However, the two overlap heavily (especially in the P/P arena where they weren't clearly defined), and one leads into the other.

So, despite the fact that the "I push you off the roof" in the above example is clearly something you have to buy into before it can happen, it feels very forceful to someone who is used to playing under a different social situation than the one described above. Because of that people want to "pad" the issue because they want to use a method of resolution that gives a certain emotional resonance. For example, the second example above can lead to a much different game than the first because in one you still have to deal with the fact that another PC wants to kill you. In the first you don't. OTOH, it may help some people if the first was phrased as a question rather than a statement, even though (and let me emphasize this part) phrasing it as a question does not change the logical or technical structure of the statement, it can change the emotional or social structure of it.

I've seen this happen over and over in getting abused players from illusionist games to open up to Nar. They will take everything you do DitM/FitM/pull/whatever in whatever to be a big pushy DatE that only the GM can use. When the GM says something, that's law. The GM is always right, and always has final word, and very often his first word is the final word. So people get a certain social/emotional habit towards game and when they move to games where they have rights and can use DitM or even DatE themselves they still feel like they're being pushed and don't have the right to push themselves. A lot of us drive ourselves nuts trying to figure out why they won't use the rules to let them do what they can do – but the reason is really pretty obvious: we haven't given them the emotional ability to deal with what they want to do yet. Part of that may well be their own bad past experience, but part of it may also be the way we frame things and the way the game feels. In a very real way that confidence doesn't come from what you can and can't do by the rules, it comes from what you feel you can and can't do under the rules.

And now that I've brought up that issue, I'm going to table it for the moment. I do think we very much need to talk about how to use itM/atE and such to make people feel confident in the game, and all that other stuff that Mo was pointing towards with P/P – but I also don't want to do it until we have some more development of how the rules would work to structure play. Once we're to a point where we can talk about different modes of structure, we can talk about how those modes support different social agendas. (Funny, isn't it, how much we talk about creative and technical agenda and how rarely we have discussions of the same depth about social or emotional agendas?)

So, I promise we'll get back to that. Social and emotional agenda are important. Anyone that thinks otherwise is being silly. I just want to have some more detail and surety on the whole DitM/DatE before we get there. Okay?

end digression

Right, so back to discussing the structure of resolution, where we'll stay until we get to the point were we're solid enough with mechanics and systems and how they're actually working to get back to the discussion on how they effect social and emotional agendas.

So The Thing Is

I think some of us have gotten used to thinking of resolution in terms of "conflict resolution" – which is a good thing in some ways. We should be able to resolve conflicts, and have coherent systems for so doing. But, we can't overlook the fact that resolving a conflict is made up of a series of smaller resolutions. Many times we overlook those because they are assumed, or because someone has the authority to just make them happen. Things like framing intent, for example, aren't often thought of in terms of resolution because in most trad games you have the authority to frame your character's intent however you want. But if you acknowledge that in some game somewhere you could have to negotiate with others to even frame your intent, you realize that there is, in fact a choice there, and that choice is actually resolving something.

From that point, you have to play and design to make a resolution that gives you what you want out of the game. If you don't want people to be endlessly figuring out what their intent is, make it so they have authority over it. If you want people to have to work together from the first moment, however, make that intent framing something that happens in the middle.

Now I'm sure you all have many questions. Good. For now, however, I only want comments from Vincent, and Mo so that they can tell me all the errors I've made, and we can work this out. From there I'll open up a thread where others can comment. I may do this in waves, adding a few new people to comment each time, so that the thread can get multiple input without getting drowned in the competing (and not really listening) voices that tend to crush so many threads in the cold, nasty world of the net.

You're also free to email me at the usual places if you want to talk or ask questions privately.

Pull|Push: The Moment of Crisis

This should be the last post here. After this I will be moving to a new blog (at long last). But I couldn't get it up and running before I went out of town on vactaion, so I figured I'd post this here. So away we go:

Since Mo brought out her first article on push and pull, there has been a lot of talk about the subject. Since she came out with the short definitions, with the help of Chris, there has been (possibly) even more talk. A lot of it centers around the divide between push and pull and when and where and why that happens, leading to a lot of confusion.

One of the key issues I see being mulled is something that is implicit in theDeep in the Game discussion (which is why it helps to read the whole thing) that may not be clear in the definitions if you haven't actually read where they came out of, is what I am choosing to call the moment of crisis. The way the moment of crisis fits into push or pull is pretty simple to say, but may take a bit longer to explain. So stay with me here, and actually read the whole thing.

Push and Pull can both lead to collaboration (pull inherently, push with any degree of skill) but the point at which the buy-in and investment happens is different. If you get the other people's investment before bringing the moment of crisis by soliciting input, buy-in, and authority sharing then it is pull. If you get the other people's responses after you have already brought the moment of crisis by using your authority to force something, then it is push. Thus the way the definitions are phrased:

Push is an assertion of individual authority.

Pull is a directed solicitation for collaborative buy-in and input

Could be read as having the addenda "before the moment of crisis" – because with Push assertion of authority comes first, and with pull solicitation comes first.* After you've pushed comes the moment of crisis, which others must respond to. After you've pulled, you work together to create a moment of crisis. So the GM saying, "You go to see the king" is a push, because after that you're seeing the King, the GM has that authority and has used it to bring the crisis. But the player asking "Can we go see the King" in a game where the players have no authority to scene frame is a pull -- because it may lead to the moment of crisis with the king, but only after the GM buys in and collaberates.

The tricky part here, really, is what the moment of crisis is. Some people have been looking at in only in terms of inserting something into the fiction. That is, if you say something and it happens in the game, it must be a moment of crisis, right? Well, no, not really. Also, it is easily possible to have a moment of crisis without anything being inserted into the fiction.

Which brings us to the tricky issue of what a moment of crisis is. To give my simplest definition: a moment of crisis is when something that strongly matters is decided or formalized. If it doesn't matter, if it isn't strong, if it isn't something that is going to bring reaction or change in a real way, it probably isn't a crisis. It's just something that happened.

As a note, my experience with Trad RPG play vs. directed Forge style play tends to be that trad RPGs are willing to spend a lot of time between moments of crisis, working up to them organically, while Forge style play tends to scene frame right up to the crisis. Consider the hours long D&D talking in the Inn scene vs. the PTA "you've got 15 minutes to find, contest, and narrate a conflict that is interesting to your character." In different games moments of crisis may come slowly, or they may come every action.

So, how do we know if something is a moment of crisis or not? That is tricky, because it depends on the social and creative situation around the table. You absolutely cannot tell if something is a moment of crisis without knowing what is going on in and around the game, and to help demonstrate why, I'm going to encapsulate a conversation between Alex F and myself that happened on the 20x20 room.

In the Deep in the Game post Chris had given an example of someone pulling by doing something in the fiction – so they've already done something, and Alex immediately went to the issue of if it is a moment of crisis or not, though he didn't use that exact term. What he said was:

"My fighter leaves his most valuable magic ring out at the campsite and falls asleep while your thief stays awake." (from the Deep in The Game discussion, right?)
I cannot see how this is purely "a solicitation for input from other players".
If I'm playing with a strong Narr agenda, stealing that ring affects my character, and my notion of her. But so does not stealing that ring. Similarly, all the duel examples being given, are direct challenges in terms of Step on Up - and to refuse to take it says something just as sure as not taking it. I am being forced to respond, just as surely as I am forced to respond if you say "I challenge you to a duel" or have your thief steal my ring in the night. (Admittedly, this gets less clear if you are playing to explore/celebrate the fiction, though I suppose a decision not to explore the implications of inter-party thieving sends a message about your preferences).

See how right away he gets at the heart of it? Did what the fighter's player did bring it to a moment of crisis by his authority? If so it is a push. But if he didn't, if the important moment hasn't happened yet, it is a pull. My response to Alex went like this, though I'm modding it here to update it to the language we're using now:

It depends on social contract and background at the table. This goes right back to the first essays on push and pull, and the fact that it can be really damn hard to know if a given example is a push or pull unless you know a lot about the background of the game.

So, if the social contract at the table is hardcore Nar, in which it is assumed that your character must respond and must make a thematic choice to every opportunity presented to him, then the example is a push. If the fighter player's goal is to force you to make a choice, any choice and not to actually get you to steal the ring, then he has already used his authority to push it to the moment of crisis. Under that setup, once the fighter leaves the ring out, you have no choice but to respond to it, and no matter how you respond to it you will have made a choice. If that was his only goal, then he's pushed you into it.

But the example as Chris stated it did not assume that. It assumed that the fighter's goal was to get you to steal the ring in order to create a plot. Not to make a choice about stealing it or not in a thematic way, but to actually steal it in order to drive the story in a new direction. The moment of crisis hasn't come yet, because the two of you together haven't decided if you are going to move the story in that direction or not yet. So simply saying "I do not steal it" is not saying "I am making a strong moral choice about my thief" it is just saying, "I'm not interested in going there right now." Because it wasn't at the moment of crisis you still have to buy in before it can get there.

Also, in the first case you may not be able to say, "I just don't notice" but in the second case you can. If you can say, "I say my character doesn't notice because he's (insert any reason here, like 'thinking about stealing the cleric's holy symbol'), so my character doesn't have to make a choice about that ring" then you aren't being forced into any response in game.

Under that social agenda the thematic choice of your character stealing it or not to define his moral compass is not the challenge to you, is not the goal of the other player, and so simply having to make an OOC choice is not forcing you to define anything other than your OOC interest at this moment. There is no crisis yet, it only gets to that point after you collaborate.
If your social contract makes that particular example something that you must respond to because it is a fiat accompli, the moment of crisis has arrived because of what they already have done with their authority, then it is probably a push. If it is not a fiat accompli, because the moment of crisis cannot arrive until after you buy in, and what is on the table is an invitation (or even a bribe), then it is a pull.

So at that point your example and Chris's example aren't actually the same example because you assumed different social situations and backgrounds. Yours is an assertion of authority ("I have the right to make you chose, and choice is the thing the game is about") and his is a solicitation for buy-in ("Hey, if you steal it this cool thing can happen"). His comes before the crisis has been reached, yours after.

Another person that gave me a useful example of this just yesterday was a new member of the Foundry who was talking about new techniques he's been picking up since he started reading the Forge and other theory articles. (I'll note that he came to it through Bruce Baugh, so despite any recent difficulties there are still bridges to be built!). One of the things he said was along the lines of:

So I know the player wants some adventure, but the character isn't going towards anything I had ready. So I stopped the game and asked OOC, "What do you need in order to get into this?" and the player told me. After that I was able to setup the situation and the player was all over it. In the old days I may not have been willing to stop the game, because I thought I had to do everything without talking about it or negotiating it."

In the "old days" all he knew how to do was push, to drive it to the moment of crisis and hope the players bought in after the moment of crisis had been established. And without flags even! (Flags are so nice for letting you target pushes that you can feel more confident about getting buy in over after the moment of crisis. Without them you're stabbing blind.) But this time rather than using his authority to bring something on and hoping it would hit the player's buttons, he stopped and got the player to buy-in and help by investing their authority over the character before the moment came. So when the werewolf (I think it was) finally showed up, the player was already all over every inch of it.

Push can lead to collaboration. Hell, it can lead to POWERFUL collaboration. But it does so by getting the other person to buy in after you've already forced something to crisis. And the downside of push is that without skill, tools, or both you run a risk of making something that other players are really not happy about. How many skilless pushy GMs in the ages have forced moments of crisis that made every player's eyes roll back in their head?

Pull gets the collaboration before the moment of crisis. It does so by getting the other person to buy in before you bring it to crisis together. And the downside of pull is that without skill, tools, or both you can run a real risk of people never letting you get anything you really want without endless concessions, or end up manipulating you into agreeing to things you didn't actually want. How many manipulative players in the ages have gotten people to buy in with them and then after the crisis was over had everyone else realize they'd been screwed?

It is also worth noting that you have to have authority to push. You can't force a moment of crisis unless you have the authority to force. You do not have to have authority to pull, because if you can get other people to buy in then their authority can carry it to crisis -- but only if you get the buy in to happen first.

So, there it is. The moment of crisis is when something important to the game, under your social and creative contract, is brought to a head. Pull gets people to buy in before that moment, and then brings everyone already invested to the moment. Push gets people to buy in (hopefully) after that moment, because the moment is brought about by the individual authority of the pusher and other reactions come after.


*Note that this works differently between the "techniques of RPGing" use of push and pull, and the general social use of push and pull. The difference is illustrated in one of Mo's responses on the Deep in the Game discussion in which she said:

I agree with you, wherein we are talking about the general, directional transaction of the act. So "Pull" at it's base, social classification is a soliciitation for buy-in and input (in or out of game, really). It's a classification used to analyze the interaction.

However Pull used as a technique, is something more than just that, which is why I think I was making the qualitative distinction earlier. "So what kind of character was he?" is a pull in social classification, but it's not a technique. It's not constructed, it doesn't really lead anywhwere specific; it encourages a particular kind of feedback in return, but it does not give any guideline for the input it expects.

So, pull as a technique is: "solicitation for buy in and input enacted to go to in a specific direction in a collaborative way."

Finding a moment of crisis for social push and pull is much harder. Doing it when you have chosen (consciously or not) to use a technique to move a game shouldn't be as hard.

Moving Soon

So, having lost posts and being unable to log in, and general wanting to centralize and such, I'm going to announce that Yud's Dice and Random Encounters will be leaving Blog Spot soon.

They'll be moving to spaceanddeath.com, and merging in some form with Sin Aesthetics. The specifics have yet to be hammered out, but it should be rocking.

So, in case you were wondering why I'm not posting, it's because I'm getting ready for the jump. I'll let y'all know when the new site goes live.

Brand goes in over his head

This started as a post on Fair Game, and as a series of responses on The Well of Urd and One Angry Polack, all of which I tell you to give a context on how this fits into the Blogsphere.

We've come a long way in game design. Some of the things people are talking about doing are breaking down RPGs and RPG theory into its component parts and rebuilding it from the ground up. Vincent is talking about shared characters and co-ownership, Ron is doing things combining real-life sins and character focus, Emily and Meg are talking about the character as imago vs. character as tool. We're getting games that allow for more types of play than before: everything from Capes and Universalis to Breaking the Ice and Polaris are rocking the boat. And as our theory reaches out even beyond those marks we start to get into rougher shoals and people start to object.

A large reason why people start to object has to do with game damage, assumptions, and other roadblocks. "That isn't how I've always played" is a thing we hear often. So is "I tried something like that once and it bit me." We all know by now where I stand on this: The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Playing. Taking chances and pushing boundaries is a good thing, and going beyond your comfort zone can be as well. And in a hobby long dominated by dead-weight social conventions, fear of change, and the unexamined credo of "this is what gaming is" we have good reason to push for change.

However, it doesn't end there. As we get farther and farther into the deep end of game theory, we are ceasing to talk about things that are about our views of game. We are starting to talk about things that are about our views of life.

When Mo and I started the whole MB typing thing, it was because we were starting to see issues in game theory land that weren't just conflicts of game theory, but conflicts in the way people think and approach subjects. Do you want to think your way through game, or feel your way through game? Should game be about details or about themes? Should you get through game by cooperating or by competing? Should it go on and feel "real" or should it end and feel "authored" or one of a hundred other possible answers?

So today as I walk the rich talk going down on the Blogsphere, I start to see some issues coming up from some folks who are much brighter than I. Meg and Emily and Charles are on Fair Games talking about the need for conflict resolution at the player level vs. cooperative resolution at the player level. On one side of the possible extreme we have the idea that if we get out their naked and let the game do what the game does by the rules we've set up, we'll create a good game through competition and the naked facing of ourselves and those we play with. On the other we have the idea that we need rules to help us work with each other so that we build something we all like without having to have anything stripped from us.

If this divide sounds familiar it should. It's been a rather large deal in just about every sphere of life for the longest time. Do we get through life by cooperating, by competing? Some combination of both? Every time we get a high school coach trying to sell a concerned mother on the idea of her son playing a game where his job will be to crush another human being into the ground we see some of this. The mother thinks it might hurt her son, teach him bad lessons. The coach thinks it can only help.

Then over on the Well of Urd we get an excellent bit about character backgrounds and how we often get players coming to the table "finished" with a character. I, however, have to belabor a point (I always do) and point out that length of background has nothing to do with how "finished" a character is other than as a possible symptom of a deeper disease. This gets me thinking about Vincent's recent talk about going into game without character backgrounds at all, and my thoughts about how in a movie you don't start interacting with a character until the "play" starts. On the other side of this I have many of my friends who like some firm grounding of their character before they start play, because for them conflict arises from background.

Now, I bet we all know areas where this has been argued in writing textbooks and classes. (Egri, for example, tells you to do up a pretty damn complete profile of every important character you are going to use to address theme, while others tell you to only make things up as they become important.) However, it goes even beyond that and into discussions about how we interact with life in general. In rhetorical studies there are a lot of different theories about the best approach to take in different situations and with different audiences. There have, historically, been many rhetoricians who will tell you not to even go up to the counter to reserve a hotel room without a fully detailed plan and backgrounding going in. Then there are others who will advise that the best way to give a speech in front of your board of directors is to go in with your knowledge of the material and then use your honest expression in order to build an immediacy of appeal that will carry more emotional weight than a pre-written address.

So, we aren't just looking at different ways of backgrounding characters here. We're starting to move past those shallows and towards a deeper issue all together. How much of a creative endevor do you improvise? How much of life? Do you have a plan before you call to order pizza, or do you just do it as you talk?

Finally, I come upon Keith talking about the way that solid rules systems, especially in areas like IC social confrontations, allows everyone to participate equally and to have the same degree of fun – as opposed to the traditional "act it out" methods that allow social powerhouses to dominate the game. My response to him is that the rules certainly do readjust the power dynamic, but they don't make it all equal. They just move the focus of power from those that can use unwritten (and unexamined?) laws to those that do better using codified and specific external systems.

What I didn't get into, but I'm sure you can all see coming now, is that this isn't just an issue of game support. In life there are multiple different takes on intuition and socialization and explicitly of procedure vs. organic structure that have influenced almost every level of our culture and civilization. So when we talk about favoring the explicit and external rules over the extemporaneous expression of a group of people, we are talking about a judgment not just about game, but about how we feel about those issues in life as well.

Same deal goes with my post about the Story of the Day and Naturalism in RPG narrative. As we change the way we tell stories we will be CHANGING THE WAY WE TELL STORIES. If you think that isn't an issue of profound import in the way that people deal with the really real world and their relationship to it and each other, you haven't been paying attention.

Now, as I'm a rhetorician it should go without saying that I think all things are contingent: so what you want from game isn't necessarily what you want from the rest of life. Just because you want explicit system competition in game, does not mean you are an explicit system competitor in your family life. However, it does say something about you that you value one in one area of your life, and another in a different area. What it says I can't tell you, you'll have to figure that out for yourself.

So as we get deeper and deeper into game theory, we have to recognize that we're getting into some deep waters of socialization, philosophy, and enculturation. We aren't just talking about gamer damage, we are talking about paradigmatic views about the very way that life works. As we get deeper and deeper this will become more and more noticeable. As we start to develop games whose structural logic depends upon those playing it believing in communal resource sharing vs. capitalistic resource domination we're going to start pushing at things that people will be even less comfortable with than issues like "GM or no GM?"

So as we go farther with this it is inevitable that we will come to cross purposes. Where we will build fully-functional, solidly designed, socially negotiated systems that do exactly what they want to do in exactly the way we want them to do it that will at the same time be absolutely unacceptable and unplayable to a vast number of people.

And I don't mean "unplayable because they won't give it a chance." And I don't mean "unplayable because it goes against what they think about game." And I don't mean "unplayable because of what their past games have made them."

I mean "unplayable because of who life has made them." And I mean "unplayable because it goes against what they think about life." And I mean "unplayable because when they give it a chance it causes them active revulsion."

When? Not now. Not long.

P.S. This is a good thing. Hearing about your game should suck.

What I Wants!

You know what I want for my blog? Threaded fucking comments, with an option to let people other than me get emailed notifications when someone responds to one of their posts.

Threaded comments used to be everywhere, and now they're nowhere. They are good. Not having them is bad.

Also, I've a bunch of new blogs over in the links to the right -- if you haven't checked them out you should do so. The Well of Urd, Ludanta Retero, and Socratic Design are all worth a peak.

Actual content to follow. Sometime.

Naturalism, the Story of the Day, and RPGs

Over on anyway Vincent is, as usual, busy accidentally on purpose kicking over a hornets nest. There's a lot of noise going on over there, and so I thought I'd step over here for a moment to say a few words that are indirectly related to what he's talking about.

The first thing to say is: there is more than one way to "tell a story." In fact, there are more than a hundred ways to do it. Between mode, audience, medium, and cultural variables the amount of things that go into making a story are massive. Even in RPGs you can play a very gamist game and end up with a story – and do so regularly. However, I think that in the far fringes of RPG theory land we're coming to the point of going off into separate directions, and I think it could do well to look at those directions and some of the cultural and rhetorical stuff going on behind them.

First off "story play" and "storytelling" are very loaded terms, and very much given to value judgment and asshattery. So I'm going to try to stay away from them. All games can result in story, the question is how they go about doing that. Simulationism, for example, can make great stories – but Sim is more often concerned with making great experiences than great stories. It is more important that you get to do the thing and feel the thing in the moment than the construction of the story. That you got to climb the wall and rescue the princess is the point, not what the climbing and rescuing do in narrative structure terms, much less in moral statement terms*.

Then there comes Nar, which is assumed to be about addressing premise. This started off as a very character centered thing – you have a character, that character addresses premise, and through that builds theme and story. However, there is still a degree of essentially experiential creation of story going on in most first and second generation Nar games. That is to say, you now consciously think about the construction of the story, but you still construct it through your character.

Now Vincent, and others, are looking at taking some of that (all of that?) element out: they want you to interface with the construction of the story from an external POV. That is, you do not guide the story through character, you guide the story as an equal teller of the story. The game can have experiential elements to it, of course. Any writer can tell you that it is possible to get very into your own story. However, the point isn't to "do this guy" or "push this guy" or to "experience this thing" it is, fully, to "tell this story as joint authors not tied to specific character elements."

Understandably a lot of people have issues with this. It moves the whole "role playing" thing off the table. Really, in a hard-line version of some of the games Vincent is directing his platonic laser-pointer towards there wouldn't be a huge amount of the experiential, of the playing or experiencing, the characters. It would be about constructing the story, rather than living the story.

Now, one of the reasons this is difficult is that our culture (not just gamers, most normal people too) have a rather odd relationship to story. We can all appreciate a good story, from Shakespeare to Spiderman 2, but we can't all tell a good story of that type. And it is that last point that is important. Of that type.

Here is something Neel said on anyway:

"The games I run and play in aren't stories. When we play, me make this gigantic tangled mass of narrative. There's too much stuff in them to be a story. We make stories out of them, by taking a particular point of view, and highlighting some bits of the mass as important, and sidelining other things.

When you take a point of view to get a slice of the game, you get a story -- protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters emerge. However, you can slice a game in multiple ways, and get multiple stories. And in each slice, who the protagonists are is different. All from the same play session."

That, I think, is the way a lot and a lot of people construct story for their game. It is a perfectly functional mode, and one that can construct story from multiple creative agendas. (Though different creative agendas will result in different ways and power dynamics of how the story is built, the story can still be there in the end.) One of the reasons this works so well is that its what we've learned to do over years of gaming: it goes well with the experiential mode and mixes the ability to "be there" and also "tell that" into one activity.

However, I'd say there is another reason that it comes easily to a lot of RPers. While we often lack the ability to tell a crafted story that is built from the ground up in our culture, we are very good at telling "the story of the day." It's something that a lot of people, gamers and non are quite good at doing. (It's also something that many are quite bad at doing – but that's not surprising. Remember, 90% of everything is crap.)

The "story of the day" is the anecdote, the funny or sad story, the appeal to joint humanity and call for emotional response that has come to dominate the field of oral storytelling in our culture. I'm a big story of the day teller, to the point that my friends, while endlessly entertained, often will turn to my wife and say "and what actually happened?" My semi-infamous Lancaster Saga is a written story of the day cycle. They work better when told orally then written, and have resulted in me having rooms full of people hanging on my every word for hours at a time. I'm a good storyteller, yo.

The thing is though, I'll tell these stories that I've been telling for a while now, and then when I'm done someone who "isn't a storyteller" and who didn't practice will often step up and tell a story just about as good as the one I just finished. Shorter, usually, but quite complete as a story and very much in the mode of social-communion that oral storytelling is supposed to fill at the social level. People, normal people, can do this. People, normal people, are good at this. Despite the fact that they suck at trying to write a story or construct a novel.

The reason for this is that there are different skill sets getting applied. When you write a novel in a mode other than the expressionist, you are constructing and deliberately laying out a lot of plot work, a lot of external control, and creation from the substratum. OTOH, when you tell a story of the day you are taking events that really happened and simply making them coherent, taking an angle on them that semi-intuitively builds your narrative pattern based on a naturalistic model. You have too much stuff going on in real life to make a story, so you take a slant on it, highlight the important points, and then build them into a simple narrative. The rhythm of experiential events forms your skeleton, the highlighted events your muscles, and then all you have to do is apply the skin of your angle and intention to get a story.#

If you're now saying that sounds a lot like what Neel wrote, you get a gold star.

Lots and lots of people can do this. They do it naturally. They do it instinctively. It is part of our cultures heritage of oral storytelling, and so being able to do that in the oral storytelling medium of RPGs only makes sense.

Now, what Vincent is looking to do is to divorce RPGs from that mode and move them more fully into the mode of "constructing a plot from the outside" – which is how most novels and screenplays get written. This will necessitate the development and support of a whole new set of skills, a set of skills that many people don't have at all. What's more, doing it collaboratively and as you go will require yet another set of skills – a set that even the great novelists and screenwriters of our day don't necessarily have. They aren't doing this real time, they're able to move back and forth and pre-plan and pre-play as much as they like. We can't do that, and so have a harder road to hoe.

Which doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact, I look forward to it. I'm excited by it. I think it can be done, and what's more will be done. But I do understand how and why people get freaked about it. It is, fundamentally, not the same type of game as those that we're used to playing and does not tell the type of story that most of us are good at telling.

Hell, it won't be a type of story that anyone is good at telling. It will require a combination of skills from different areas (impro, dramatic writing, oral storytelling) that are pretty rare. Which just means we need excellent mechanical support to make it go, to give people who are interested tools to build new skills.

And for those who aren't interested? No worries, and no value judgments. Our societies bourgeois power-discourse value system based on sellability is crap, and there is nothing inherently more valuable or worthy about writing a novel than telling a story of the day. No one is (or should be) saying that one is better than the other. What I am saying is that I like both, and have so far only been able to successfully and repeatedly do one – and I (and others) are now looking for ways to do the other.

Next: Myerrs Briggs game type test.



* Though it is worth noting that John Kim, and others, have pointed out that reflection upon experience based play like this can lead to celebration/reflection/meaning in a way not dissimilar to the anthropological understanding of myth-mysteries, so hey....

# One of the reasons that people who are bad at the story of the day are so bad at it is that they fuck up one of these levels: either they tell you all the details (screwing up the pacing for the whole event), don't hit the right highlight events, or don't take any angle on it and just spit out the unexpurgated contents of their minds at you. I leave the conclusions about how this interacts with RPGs and story creation to you.