So Mo finally updated Sin Aesthetics with an article by the name of Stance Crap and Authorial Intent. In the article and ensuing discussion, I think lots of folks are using Stance to mean a lot of related issues. I’ve been prone to do the same, myself. In the course of commenting, I tried to formulate a definition of “stance”, because I’m all into defining stuff right now in the absence of writing Full Light, Full Steam. In any case, when I started picking it apart, it fell into way too many pieces, most of them assumptions, and this is why stance won’t be making an appearance on the Terminology in Use page here. It’s almost rhetorically useless.

This is what I came up with:
stance - the fictional information that a player is allowed to call upon, the fictional elements the player is allowed to affect, and whose priorities the player is expected to follow when proposing statements about the fiction.

This term is weighted with a ridiculous number of distinctions and switches, many of which are mired in irrelevant assumptions. The one little itty bitty term comprises (a) available information, (b) available targets, and (c) the proper decision-making protocol, combined with (d) tons of social contract stuff (’allowed to’, ‘expected’), and (e) the basic operating principle of roleplaying. I’ve removed the GM/Player assumption, but the in-character/out-of-character assumption is still pretty profoundly embedded in the definition I’ve got, and I can’t figure out how to get it out. How did we ever use this term to meaningfully communicate with each other?

The answer, of course, is that the assumptions in the definition were the context of discussion back then, and the very suggestion that players could do things that the GM was doing was a novel one to most of the participants of the discussion. I am totally taking up the role of some punk kid toting a laptop who’s snorting at a room-filling mainframe made out of vacuum tubes, here. This ain’t a criticism of the RGFA’s work in distinguishing the stances, this is a recognition that we’ve come far enough down the road that we don’t need “stances” any more.

There’s a lot of talk about “playerless” games right about now, which goes right up this alley in a different tack. We’ve sort of dug down through the history and assumptions of “what gaming is” to the point where we can see that roleplaying is basically saying stuff and agreeing with it. The guidelines and restrictions on what we can say and when and how we agree about it are multifarous and nowhere near as limited as the handful of stances that we started with. I am curious if we’ll still really be role playing once we discard the roles, but that’s a largely irrelevant question and one of my doomed New Year’s Resolutions is to stop quibbling about semantics.

Let’s take apart stance, shall we? The stuff you can affect — the actor/author versus director bit — let’s call that reach. Guess what? We already have a term for what “reach” is, it’s an authority tool. If I can say something about some fictional element, I have authority over it, and you’d think that we’d either agree to that ahead of time (explicitly or implicitly) or maybe write it down… hey look! Character sheet! I have “Really Fucking Strong 2d3″ written down on Strong Man Jim’s character sheet, so I have authority over statements which involve Jim’s strength! Look over by the GM, he’s prepared for the game and he’s got all kinds of character sheets next to him. It’s another case of “we’ve been playing like this the entire time.”

The information you are allowed to base your conclusions out of is founded on the assumption of a player character, and we usually want individual characters to act organically. We’re all clever enough to finagle a way to get a character to do something that we want them to do. Do we even need to codify this? The priorities that we base the decision on, well, that falls under the same category, doesn’t it? Let’s make the characters act in character, doing what they would in the ways that they would want to. We can do this in two different ways, as a restriction, “Characters cannot act out of character,” or as a requirement, “Characters must act in character.” Yes, there is a difference — if we do it up as a restriction, then authority tools only apply to character intent when such an intent is appropriate to the character. If we do it up as a requirement, however, use of associated authority tools must be used to forward character intent. See the difference?

I’m going to speculate here that most of the “problems” with people making statements of character intent based on out-of-character knowledge are symptomatic of the player not having any other way (or any other easy way) to get what they wanted out of the current structure. Their “reach” wasn’t big enough for them. If we scale that according to player preference, or just bash it apart through playerful or GMful play, do we need restrictions on characters actually acting like themselves anymore? What if we define the characters as tools with purposes? What happens then?

Alternately, look at Polaris, look at Capes, look at apocalypse girl, and the many different ways they dice up ‘who says what and when’ and then the second step, ‘how the rest of the table responds.’ I don’t think any of the three stances adequately describes the operation of these games. If I play a character’s good side and you play the character’s bad side, how the hell are we supposed to distinguish what information is available to either of us? We can’t, and we don’t need to in this instance. These games have transcended stance.

Now, I’ll wrap up by being a little pragmatic. As introductory terms, the stances are still very useful for folks whose entire roleplaying experience has been traditional, mainstream gaming. We should keep them around, but with the understanding that they’re beginner terms, and will lead to beginner questions, like toddlers asking if an omnipresent god is in the potty, too. They’re little knots of possibilities, not the strings themselves, which can be tied up in dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways. So for the new guy, we can hand him the knot first, show him how it works, and then untie the knot to show him the strings they’re made out of. Meanwhile, I’ll be playing with the strings.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under RPG Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.