he Big Model was about what is your relationship with your character ("actor,

author, or director," was the answer), how does the GM treat your character's
actions (in our naivete, "gamist, narrativist, simulationist"), and what kind of
mechanics do you use to represent the in-game fiction ("drama, fortune, karma," but
usually fortune). This presumption of one GM and several players with one character
each, all mechanicallly represented, is convenient, but it's lazy and complacent.
It means that if a piece of theory works under that circumstance, it's good enough
for the Big Model, even if it doesn't work when you have co-GMs, solo games, no GM,
freeform, troupes of characters, LARPs, diceless, or any other arrangement you
might design into a game.

Emily of course labors under no such presumption!

So take the Big Model's "positioning" - behavioral, social, and contextual

statements about a character, available to the game's currency systems - and strip
out the presumed GM/player split, the presumed one-player-one-character
association, and the presumed mechanical representation. Now:

1. We aren't talking about a character, we're talking about all kinds of fictional
stuff. Every significant fictional thing in play, not just the characters, might
have behavioral, social, and contextual features that are available to the game's
currency systems.

2. We aren't talking about a character's components, we're talking about a

player's. Those aren't my character's hit points, they're my hit points for that
character. That's not the monster's number of attacks, it's my number of attacks
for that monster. We're talking about what I'm able to do as a participant in the
game.

3. We're still talking about currency systems. That is, we're still talking about
the ways that what you do here affects what happens there, the ways that the
process of play change the landscape of play, the gameplay options available,
moment by moment, interaction by interaction.

4. But we aren't only talking about a player's numbers, dice, ratings, traits.
We're talking about those, PLUS all the non-mechanical things that direct,
constrict, and expand the current gameplay options available to the game's
participants.

What do we get? Taken all together, here's a new, less parochial definition:

A player's position is the total set of all of the legitimate gameplay options
available to her at this moment of play. Positioning refers to the various factors
and processes, including in-fiction, cue-mediated, and interpersonal, that
determine a player's position.

From here, we can see (I hope!) that Emily's "fictional positioning" is the in-
fiction part of this new definition, and the Big Model's "positioning" is what this
definition becomes if you consider only GMed, one-player-one-character,
mechanically-representing games.

A game's procedures give you some set of available legal plays.

Which of the legal plays available to you do you choose?

Some of the legal plays available to you are better plays, with regard to the
object of the game, and some are worse. This is the matter of strategy: of the
available legal plays, there's a smaller set of strategically sound plays.
Which of the strategically sound plays available to you do you choose?

This is the matter of style.

In some games, there are almost always a wide variety of strategically sound plays,
and style can rise to preeminence in your thinking.

In other games, if there's a narrow set of strategically sound plays, playing

stylishly can mean compromising on strategy. If it's a multiplayer game, your
fellow players might consider this to be bad play, or admirable, or quirky, or
whatever else, depending upon the game and your fellow players and how it's going
and so on.

Everybody still with me? Legal plays, the subset that are strategically sound, and
the stylistic choice you make between them?

1. On 2014-07-17, Vincent said:

Sometimes, in some games, you'll have only one legal play available to you. For
instance, in Chess, when your king is in check and only one play can resolve it; in
Poker, when you've been called and must reveal your cards; in Murderous Ghosts,
when the MC book tells you that your play is to have the ghost say the explorer's
name.

In those cases, there's no strategic choice, but you have a stylistic choice in how
you present or frame your play.

In Chess, you can make the play with resolution, or resignation, or you can try and
re-try illegal moves in a vain attempt to get out of it.

In Poker, you can smirk, shrug, glower, showboat.

In Murderous Ghosts, the stylistic choices you make are everything: how the ghost
sounds, how it moves, whether it seems aware or not, what it's communicating by
saying the explorer's name.

direct link
marginalia

This makes...
Nick go "Isn't that MG stuff strategic?"*
VB go "Right!"*
Nick go "Gotcha"
BR go "the poker might be, too"*

*click in for more

2. On 2014-07-17, Vincent said:

Coming up: special challenges in this department that many RPGs face.

direct link
marginalia

3. On 2014-07-17, Levi said:

With you.
Attempting to put my thoughts spurred by last time in this language:

I feel like there's a significant deal to be said in the games we play about the
distinction between moves that are legal (what you can say and expect to have
effect) and moves that are explicitly endorsed (by hard-coding them with additional
rules, or otherwise calling them out).

And, interestingly, how that doesn't always line up with what's strategically
sound. Sometimes, some of the strategically sound moves *aren't* what's called
out, and that has weird effects.

Extreme example: Joe looks at the special system for Thing X, and decides to do
something else that doesn't *quite* fit the Thing X category, because he likes GM
judgement and ad-hoc application better than the special system. That's a...
Legal, strategically sound... Weird thing.

(All this being an aside, really, but it's where my head goes with this.)

direct link
marginalia

4. On 2014-07-17, Vincent said:

Levi: Agreed. Many RPGs allow procedurally legal plays that have no procedural
effect, or ambiguous procedural effect. It is weird!

A game has procedures. Procedures are things like "on your turn, choose a legal
card from your hand and play it," "when your character gets into a fight, roll 2d6
and add your Combat Value," and "to make your meeple on the screen jump, push the A
button."

A game has components. Components are things like a deck of cards and scratch paper
to keep score, a conversation and character sheets and dice, and a controller plus
a meeple in a level full of stuff on a screen.

A game has an object, or more than one, or none. Objects are things like "at the
end of any hand, if anybody's reached 100 points or more, the game ends, and the
player with the lowest score wins," "make the imaginary world vivid, make the
characters' lives exciting, and play to find out what happens," and "run your
meeple all the way to the end of the level without dying."

Together, these three things are a complete game. When you're making a game, you
create its procedures, its components, and its object-or-objects-or-none. Then you
publish.

But a game also has strategy and style. Strategy and style are implicit in the
relationship between the other three, emerge from the other three, or lay over the
other three without changing them.

On your turn, which of your legal cards do you choose to play?

When the GM turns to you and asks you what your character does, what do you choose
to say?

At every moment of play, do you choose to push the A button now? Or what?

Take my game Murderous Ghosts. Murderous Ghosts has:

- Procedures. Two little books full of almost nothing but procedures, in fact.
- Components. The two books, the deck of cards, the conversation between the
players.
- An object. If the explorer escapes unmurdered, the explorer player wins.

The strategy of Murderous Ghosts is really fun. It is, at heart, a gambling game,
and a string of bad luck might always see you murdered. But if you play well, you
can time your draws so that you make your riskiest draws when the stakes are lowest
and your safest draws when the stakes are high. Meanwhile, the ghost player is
trying to mislead you about which draws are low-stakes and high-stakes, to make you
misstep. But the game text doesn't include any mention of this, it leaves you to
learn your own way forward.

And then tucked into the back of the ghost player's book, there are two short
essays: "What Ghosts Do" and "What Ghosts Are." These are pure style. Their purpose
is to inspire the ghost player to say scary and ever-scarier things. In fact, while
they include some assertions and an instruciton or two, they're both over 50% made
of pointed questions: "Is this ghost reenacting the horrors that it inflicted on
others in life, or will it inflict on others the horrors that it suffered?"

You could play the game, see its procedures fully through, win and lose, and even
enact strategies to try to win more and lose less, without ever reading these two
essays.

Everybody with me? Procedures, components, object-or-objects-or-none, strategy, and

style?

1. On 2014-07-15, Vincent said:

Here's an example of strategy. Consider three great old trick-taking games, Hearts,
Spades, and Knaves. Their procedures and components are almost identical. Their
objects, however, are very different, and this means that their strategies are
different too.

I've played so much Hearts over the years that I'm good at Spades (because I can
read my hand pretty well at the draw) but terrible at Knaves (because I
instinctively undervalue winning a safe trick and overvalue avoiding the Jacks).

How RPG Rules Work

This is description, not prescription.

The way I figure it, an RPG's rules coordinate three things:

The fictional things and events and stuff in the game. The interactions of the
players themselves. Dice, numbers, words, maps - real-world tokens, things, props,
representations. Emily calls 'em "cues" and I think that's just right.

If you can pick it up and hand it to another player, or change it with a pencil and
eraser, it's a real-world cue. If it exists only in our heads and our conversation,
it's in-game.

So here's a rule: "1. Don't mess with the dark forest to the North, it's
Vincent's."

This rule coordinates the interactions of us, the players, with the made-up stuff
in the game. The rule says that if the in-game stuff comes to include our
characters entering the forest, we change our interactions in a particular way: we
defer to me, Vincent, about what's what.
The rightward-pointing arrow is "our characters entering the forest," the leftward-
pointing arrow is "we defer to Vincent about what's what."

Here's a rule: "2. Subtract the roll on the damage die from your character's hit
points."

This rule coordinates our interactions with the real-world cues we're employing.
The leftward-pointing arrow is "the roll on the damage die," the rightward-pointing
arrow is "subtract from your character's hit points." The die represents every
real-world thing we're using: dice, character sheets, life stones, everything.

Notice that non-RPG games' rules are all entirely like this one. Monopoly, Chess,
Die Siedler - they have no fictional in-game, just people interacting and real-
world tokens.

Here's a rule: "3. If your character has higher ground than his opponent, make your
attack roll at +3."

Now this rule takes information from the fictional in-game and applies it to the
real-world tokens we're using. The long rightward-pointing arrow is "your character
has higher ground than his opponent, +3," and the leftward-pointing arrow is "make
your attack roll."

I've drawn the long arrow through the people because of course it's the people who
interpret the in-game and apply the rule.

Here's a rule: "4. If your character takes damage greater than 4 on the damage
roll, he's knocked down."

Here the rules instruct us to have certain things happen fictionally when certain
things happen in the real world. The rightward-pointing arrow is "the damage roll"
and the long leftward-pointing arrow is "damage greater than 4, knocked down."

Here's a rule: "5. If your character's opponent tries to disarm your character,
make a Hold Weapon check. If you fail, your character is disarmed, and you thus
suffer the unarmed penalty until you retrieve your weapon."

The more complicated your rule, the more complicated the arrangement of arrows. The
short leftward-pointing arrow is "your character's opponent tries to disarm your
character." The long rightward-pointing arrow is "make a Hold Weapon check." The
long leftward-pointing arrow is "your character is disarmed" - the part where we
imagine your character's sword skittering across the rocks. The short rightward-
pointing arrow, at last, is "suffer the unarmed penalty."

If this were the Weapon Breakage rule instead of the Weapon Droppage rule, the
short rightward-pointing arrow would be both "suffer the unarmed penalty" and "add
'broken' to your weapon on your character sheet."

So now, we employ various rules in various orders and combinations over time.

Right?

This animation shows kind of what Dogs in the Vineyard or D&D or Shadowrun or PTA
or V:tM is like in play.

The way Charles' group plays Ars Magica would have practically only the arrows
between the players and the in-game lit up:

(I'm very open to correction about this, but it's my impression.)

The way my group plays Ars Magica would be about the same, but we'd have the arrows
crossing the players light up a few times per session:

And finally, Jonathan Tweet in Everway describes three kinds of rules: Drama,
Fortune and Karma.

Rules like this are Drama rules.

Rules like this are Fortune rules if the real-world cues include dice or some other
randomizer; Karma rules if they don't.
On 1-19-05, Matt wrote:

I really only clicked to see if comments were working, but now I feel obliged to
come up with something.

My ideal game, I think, has a balance of movement across all the arrows. This might
be a useful diagram for identifying the kind of play people prefer by making
certain arrows darker, etc. Or not. Shit, it's only 6 here and what am I doing up?
On 1-19-05, anon. wrote:

"Notice that non-RPG games' rules are all entirely like this one. Monopoly, Chess,
Die Siedler - they have no fictional in-game, just people interacting and real-
world tokens."

I would strongly disagree with this. The fictional worlds may not be as pronounced
or as strongly identified with as in RPGs, but they definately exist.

Case in point: Diplomacy. There's you intereacting with other people and the game
board, but there's almost always a shared imaginative space of diplomatic missions
running back and forth and high-level meetings and so on.

Even Monopoly can work this way. Who does not make sound effects when they move
their pieces? Who does not chortle like Snidely Whiplash when they send another
player to bankruptcy? And in these moments, a fictional scene plays out.

Who knows, perhaps when Kasparov is advancing his knight, he's thinking of a
medieval kingdom?

later
Tom

On 1-19-05, Vincent wrote:

I guess somebody was going to say that.

Maybe my best answer is:

Playing Monopoly, no arrows come rightward out of the fiction. Imagine whatever you
want, nobody else cares.

When we talk about the imaginary stuff in the game re: rules, we aren't talking
about what I'm imagining in my own personal head anyway. We're talking about the
shared fiction, which means that it's communicated and agreed to. Kasparov might be
thinking about a kingdom or his laundry, I'm pretty sure he's not saying it all out
loud and trying to get his opponent to buy into it.

And just to head off the other half: of course the players can create house rules
to make Monopoly into a roleplaying game. Whatever! I don't think it's especially
controversial to observe that, as written, Monopoly ain't one. Lord I hope it's
not.
On 1-19-05, C. Edwards wrote:

"Notice that non-RPG games' rules are all entirely like this one. Monopoly, Chess,
Die Siedler - they have no fictional in-game, just people interacting and real-
world tokens."

I totally accept and enjoy those kinds of rules in a non-RPG. They seem annoying,
unsatisfying, and extraneous most of the time when they are incorporated into a
role-playing game. It almost seems like a wasted action to have rules that don't
directly interact with the shared imaginary space.

I want to achieve nearly 100% efficiency in my rule/work to shared imaginary space

exchange.
On 1-19-05, Bryant wrote:

Nice! Very nice. I agree with this 100% and I like the arrows a lot.
On 1-19-05, Chris wrote:

Wow! Vincent- it just struck me how much power goes into the traditional GM's hands
in that they get final say not only over what goes into that imaginary space, but
also what effects the imaginary space has back OUT into the game itself. So, say a
player wants to put a character in a tactically advantageous situation, and even
the GM agrees("You're on higher ground, with the sun to your back, etc.") but only
if the GM decides to apply modifers back out to the Tokens in play, will the SIS
have a solid effect.

This is probably one of the best little ways of explaining the whole social effect
of gaming there. Neat.
On 1-19-05, Ben Lehman wrote:

I have this whole essay brewing about this two rightmost little arrows. If you're
going to beat me to it, let me know.

yrs--
--Ben
On 1-19-05, Vincent wrote:

I have no plans!

What's your essay going to say?

On 1-19-05, Ben Lehman wrote:

Like most of my essays, it's going to say "Look, a thing!"

We physicists aren't so keen on the "persuasive argument" thing.

Essentially, I think some games have something called "toy quality" where the
game's mechanic itself is fun to play without needing to reference the SIS at all.
I think that games with toy quality are a bridge to board and card and dice games.
I also think it might be a key to Gamism, but I'm not sure.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. Hey, remember when I was talking about how "everything is system?" I was going
"look, see, those arrows are symmetric!" Just couldn't express myself well.

P.P.S. Heck, I still don't know what system is. Is it that box on the right? Or is
that just mechanics?

P.P.P.S. Say we're using a published setting with canon guidebooks. Is the setting
in the right box or the left box?
On 1-19-05, Vincent wrote:

The arrows are System. System is what we do.

The left box is a snapshot: what's happening in the game right now. You can imagine
its contents changing over the course of play, alongside the arrows lighting up and
going out.

The right box is everything that's real that we consult to help us decide what's
happening in the left box. Along with dice and the writing on character sheets and
stuff, it can include the contents of setting guidebooks. Really though, the vast
most of the contents of setting guidebooks simply don't appear in the illustration;
they wait outside of frame in case we want them.

Here's Emily Care Boss, writing in 2006 about the reward cycles she sees in
freeform play:

creativity: free form play, of whatever stripe, has as its primary reward the
creation of in-game events, material etc. Think about how allocation of narrative
rights have become a huge part of mechanical systems: people want to be able to be
creative, and giving them the right to do so is a powerful reward. How this is
allotted and allocated in free-form is not as regulated by reproducible procedures,
though, instead it often comes down to things like the informal social networks
that Christian [Griffen] points out. Because of:

reinforcement and mirroring: what is real in a game world is what gets played/with.
If everyone else ignores or doesn't know about what you've made up, it may as well
not exist. So, the people who are the most "powerful" creatively speaking in
freeform, are the ones whose ideas get picked up on and incorporated into the play
of others. Those whose actions affect others and who end up having them reverberate
around the shared creation. This can be done via any channel depending on the type
of play: character action, background creation, informal discussion out of
character, or "gming" (which in free-form, means setting the parameters of play,
use of props, dissemination of information, creation of guidelines and
intervention/adjudication. damn, online gms can do a hell of alot, more even, than
tabletop ones, in a way, because there may be so many more people involved. same
with large larps).

positioning: this is a wierd one that seems to arise out of the way that narrative
control is not parcelled out in a regulated way in freeform. Other folks may have
had very different experiences, so take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, what it is
is setting up in-game events and interpretations to support your following
(character) actions. For example, if I want to shoot your character with a gun, I
have to first establish that there is a gun present, that it is loaded etc. If I
want to kill your character, I will have to establish, and get others to
collaborate with me in establishing, that my character can keep yours from
escaping, that mine has the ability to successfully shoot yours, that help will not
arrive in time etc. Instead of a die roll, based on various things that represent
all this stuff, it has to be negotiated, or simply spoken and accepted as "what has
happened" in order for it to occur. So in freeform, you may be thinking (even
unconsciously) three moves down the road, in order to back yourself up on future
actions.

Well, that's a couple anyway. Sorry to go on. It is a big thing for me, though,
that there are systems in there, even if they are unspoken and little understood.

(my emphasis; original here)

Here, Emily's talking about the player's position: what gameplay options do I, as a
player, have available to me right now? Over the course of the game, my legitimate
moves change; what are my legitimate moves at this moment of play?

In freeform games, Emily says, what determines your selection of available

legitimate moves is the current state of the fictional stuff in the game. If
there's a gun in your character's hand, that adds certain moves to the selection
available to you, the player. If there's a gun in someone else's character's hand,
that changes the likely outcomes of the moves you might make.

(For now, let's politely pretend that making a move in a roleplaying game means
asserting something, like "my guy shoots yours," and subjecting it to the group's
assent or dissent to determine its actual in-game veracity. I think this is not
true, but it makes it easier for now.)

Contrast freeform with cue-mediation. The freeform rule at play here is "if you've
established that your character is holding a gun, all other things being equal,
it's a legitimate move to assert that your character fires it at someone." The
equivalent cue-mediated rule would be "if you have a gun on your character sheet,
all other things being equal, it's a legitimate move to assert that your character
fires it at someone." See the difference? Playing freeform, we look into the
fiction-as-established to determine whether a possible move is legitimate; playing
with cues, we look over at the cue to determine whether it is.

Everybody with me so far?

For now, I'd like to answer questions about things you don't understand, not about
things you don't agree with. There'll be time to disagree later, once I've said my
whole piece. Hold off on disagreeing.

Oh, unless you're Emily! Emily, I'd love a quick thumbs-up-thumbs-down confirmation
that I've read you right.

1. On 2012-11-14, Vincent said:

Two notes!

1) My use of "freeform" here follows Emily's. Others use "freeform," especially

"structured freeform," to mean other things, and I'm not implicating them in any
way. Try not to get distracted by the various things "freeform" can mean.

2) In a given game design or game in play, freeform and cue-mediation can happily
coexist. You see where I included "all other things being equal" in both rules?
Often in practice that includes a quick check across the boundary between them.
Like when you have a pistol on your character sheet, but in the fiction as
established your character's just stepping out of the shower, right?

...I'm saying that one should invest in the SIS, and specifically, in Situation,
moment-by-moment. Who's there, what's going on, what does it look like, sound like,
feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well
without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their
imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still
sound great in a write-up but to me, they're leaving a bad taste, like reading a
good book way too fast.

And here's me in agreement: if you have a game whose rules don't adequately depend
upon fictional causes, it's easy and easier to let the game's fictional details
fall away.

"Adequately" can mean both quantity and quality. If you have a game whose rules
don't often enough depend upon fictional causes, yes; if you have a game whose
rules don't significantly enough depend upon fictional causes, too.

Some of you got what I was saying the first time I said it. I hope that everybody
gets what I'm saying now! Tomorrow: significantly enough and real-world effects.