A pictoral representation of the state of conversation regarding game design available through the internet.

I have a Google Alert for Full Light, Full Steam that I set up, like, years ago, when there weren’t any mentions and I shortly forgot that it even existed. Then it started sending me notifications that my game is being talked about (which is, by the way, really fucking weird), the most recent of which was Qien Es Mas Macho at the 20×20 Room. Generally I don’t read 20×20 because (a) it’s D&D-centric and I’ve played exactly one session of D&D in my life, but more puissantly, (b) the discussions are like what I imagine the European Parliament are like — everybody speaking a slightly different language, and barely communicating with each other. This thread is a prime example, with folks defending at least three different iterations of Forge theory as if they were all the same, and a lot of non-Forgies criticizing what gets put out there as “What the Forge Says”.

Anyway, somebody mentioned Full Light, Full Steam pretty tangentially as a short-term game with little replay value. As I really don’t want to tangent that discussion any more than it already is, I thought I’d throw up a short post here.

You can totally play Full Light, Full Steam as a short-ass one-shot game, going through one Situation and then playing, I dunno, Mountain Witch on the next Game Nite. The game will work; there are little sidebars that give tips on how to shift a few things around so that the one-shot works better. I hadn’t thought of it in such terms, but I suppose this would help out Con games, too.

You can also play FLFS as a medium or long term game, putting your characters through three, ten, twenty different Situations over the course of howeverlong you want to play. Each Situation should play out in a session or two to create rather episodic play, but you can, a la Buffy, play through lots and lots of those situations. The character advancement system is scalable (I stole from Clinton even before I read Shadow of Yesterday, apparently) so your power-creep can be managed. The longer-ranged games are also probably a little more interesting if you enable the Troupe Play rules so that everybody is playing a handful of people, but that’s probably my bias showing through.

Now mind, personally I prefer the mid-range in terms of campaign length. I just don’t get why you’d want to stick with the same characters and story for years on end. I also have no idea how people are able to arrange such long-standing commitments with their social calendars. I doubt the Next Game will have the same kind of support for long-ass games as FLFS does, because I won’t be working off the same “standard assumptions” about how an RPG is supposed to be constituted. For the nonce, however, FLFS should be able to support both.

God, I love reading people outside the Forge community talk about the Forge.

Here’s a gem:
1. Some Forgites are arrogant jargon-spewers.
2. Some Forgites have worthwhile things to say about gaming.
3. Some Forgites are both.

Oh, even better, when eyebeams encapsulates the foundation of Forge thought in his “Gamers are bad at gaming” and definition of “fun” specifically as something that he, as a “commercial RPG writer,” knows and the Forge does not.

Originally this was going to be a thread called “The Problem with Game Designers” and posted into Indie RPG Design, but most of what I’m saying has already been said in a couple other posts there. I don’t want to retread old ground, but I do want to look at it for a moment, if only because those other things weren’t put together like I’ve got them put together in my head. I also get borderline pissy and certainly ranty, and I try to keep that sort of thing off the Forge So.

The problem with game designers is that they don’t ask questions about their game designs. This is originally inspired by the posts to Indie RPG Design where people copy-paste a segment of their game from their word processor into the forum, and then append a line something like “Whaddaya think, guys?” Some of them want a round of applause, which is pretty much not at all what the Forge is for, but I don’t think it’s really that many of these posters.

I think that most of them are looking for validation, yes, but most of them are looking for validation of a very specific kind. They chose this section to make into a forum post; why? There’s something about it that bothers them, or (more rarely) they’re going out on a limb and want to make sure they’re not crazy. But they don’t say, “Hey, this bothers me” or “Is this crazy?” They don’t ask the question that they really want to ask.

In parallel, there are the guys who post asking what the proper way to do something is. How do I write my setting? How many skills “should” I have? Or the real gems like, How much XP should it take to level? To these posters, there is some inviolate, universal standard of how RPGs are supposed to be designed, and they want to hear the hallowed voices of the Forge compare their efforts with the standard. Certainly, the experienced, published designers of the Forge know the standard better than these new guys do, so they ask.

Of course, there is no standard. The requirements of any piece of art is idiosyncratic to the artwork itself. The experienced, published designers of the Forge at least know that. An RPG does not need levels, skills, XP, or even settings, but it is hard communicating to the poster that the thing that they’ve been so worried about is, well, not necessary. This applies to the “How many skills?” guys as well as the “Whaddaya think?” guys — their participation at the Forge is predicated on an assumption about game design that says that there’s a right way to make games and there’s a wrong way.

Which is, in a word, bupkiss.

The new guys post to the Forge without asking questions because they think the questions are self-evident — or they hope they’re self-evident to the experienced designers who should know these things. The guys posting and asking the “should” questions just go a step further into the confusion by assuming that there is the standard that their design will be stacked up against. They’re comparing themselves to something that doesn’t exist; I can’t think of a surer plan for failure. What both these guys need — and very occasionally get — is a “There is no spoon” moment.

We tend to ask the “Big Three” questions: “What’s your game about? What do the characters do? What do the players do?” The answers from pre-spoon-moment posters are invariably, “Having fun. Save the world. Have fun.” Because when you are laboring under universal standard of RPG quality, the answer to the Big Three is always the same, and large parts of it can go unsaid because they’re part and parcel of the standard. We don’t need to say “the players each take one character and portray their actions, constrained by the abilities and knowledge that that character has” because that’s how roleplaying games work, isn’t it?

Again, bupkiss.

Oh wait, you thought I meant the fictional universal standard was bupkiss, there, didn’t you? No, I meant the Big Three questions are bupkiss, because they’re not doing what they should be doing. They are not providing the No Spoon Moment; they are assuming that these posters have already had it when it’s patently obvious that they have not. This is asking someone questions that they do not have the context to answer correctly; it borders on intellectual dishonesty. It is toying with them.

Alternately, a common response to pre-spoon-moment designers is “Go play these games.Go play Sorcerer. Go play Dogs. Go play Universalis.” Which would probably work, excepting of course that it isn’t going to happen. (It also makes the Forge look like all it does is pimp its own games.) Most of the time, we don’t even say, “You are making a lot of assumptions. Go play X.” First-posters who have not been reading the Forge for months and years are not going to arrange to get their friends together to play a game just to see the brave new world that nobody is telling them is there to be found. “Go Play X” is just as much bupkiss as asking pre-no-spooners the Big Three questions. It doesn’t work.

I’m looking forward to the Intro to Big Model forum/article/whatever, because I’m hoping there will be a thread there specifically designed to provide the No Spoon Moment. If there isn’t, I’ll start one. I don’t know exactly what shape it will or should be; I know that one way would be to list common assumptions (”each player plays one character”), point out its fallacies, and provide examples of alternatives. But even that would be a dull tool to use — it’d get long, pedantic, not incredibly entertaining to read, and worst of all, it would dilute the single point that needs to get across: “Roleplaying is people collaboratively imagining events. Everything else is optional. No really, everything else. Designing a game is directing that activity towards a specific purpose. You, as the designer, choose that purpose. Everything else that you add needs to serve that purpose.” Would that provide a No Spoon Moment? Maybe. Would examples help? Maybe. But it would sure as hell be more likely to work than the Big Three or telling them to go play Sorcerer.

There is much talk by such luminaries as Clinton and Vincent and apparently Matt Snyder’s blog which I haven’t found yet, and the talk revolves around reformating the means of discussion about gaming.

There’s repeated dissatisfaction with the pleblian forum software, of answering the same questions over and over, dealing with the same misunderstandings, and people not paying proper respect to things that other people have already agreed on. All this gives rise to suggestions that either limit who can contribute or to assign some sort of vote-based quality standard. I’d just like to chime in briefly to say that the latter sounds great, and the former alternately chills and disgusts me.

I am all about a community-enforced quality standard that rates posters for expertise and credibility. That sort of thing already happens informally: Clinton, Ron, Vincent, Ralph, and a few others say something and people listen; folks like me say something and people give me half and ear and wait for me to publish. That’s fine; that’s community norms and standards being expressed and enforced and it is, on the whole, a good thing.

Creating a sandbox where the luminaries pontificate at each other and everybody watches as a mute audience or a short-comment peanut gallery, however, does not foster a community, it fosters an elite, and it fosters a fan base. Nobody, and I mean nobody, needs that shit. I’m pretty certain that the luminaries who would make the theoretical cut have strong enough self-images that they do not require the ego-stroke — these guys are better than that. And us great unwashed masses don’t need pedagogues — we’re better than that, too.

Chris Lehrich has proposed something of a middle-of-the-road approach similar to an academic journal, where anyone can submit but there is a strong editorial team that determine what gets in and what doesn’t. While I think that’d be nifty, I also think the human time commitment for reviewing, discussing, and approving articles before releasing them for public discussion is a bit unweildy and in the end unnecessary. Quality ratings by user votes could fulfill a similar (though not identical) function for a greatly reduced overhead commitment.

I don’t have the technical skills to set such a beast up, but I’d be a very willing participant if it ever did see the light of day.

So the Forge closed down the Theory and GNS forums, as Ron has been gearing up to do for, fuck, over a year, now. So it’s not like it’s a surprise. It is kind of sad, though. RPG Theory was the board that I posted the most to, where I was the most comfortable, where my interests lay. 226 of my 460 posts have been there. I understand that Ron wants to talk theory in context of Actual Play and Actual Design — I’m just not in a place right now where I can do much of either, so I doubt I’ll be able to participate there as much as I was on the Theory board. A good chunk of the Forge closed down for me today by raising the bar higher than I can go. Which is fine; they are trying to raise the level of discourse, and the level of discourse is something that I’ve always appreciated there. My voice just won’t be as large a part of that discourse any more.

So I suppose I’ll shift more of my theory maunderings over here; expect more abstracted conceptions of how games operate in the months to come. I am looking forward to elaborating the interaction model with articles like Focusing the Scope, and then incorporating them back into later versions of the bigger model. I’m very eager to see if this keeps generating insights for me.

And on occasion, when I manage to pry an hour out of my life to write FLFS, I’ll throw something up over on the Forge. Maybe I’ll even get some actual play in someday, and report on that. And then we can all go skating at Lucifer’s Ninth Circle rink. Yay!

Three teams of architects bid for the contract to build a new community center. Teams are drawn from the community, and presumably would be using the community center once it’s built.

Team N creates a proposal where the entire building enables the community to create art, providing a lavish stage area and many rooms for props, costumes, and make-up; art studios; basement rooms for pottery wheels and kilns; and dance rooms.

Team G creates a proposal where the building provides the community with an olympic pool, basketball courts, raquetball courts, and expansive fields for baseball and soccer.

Team S creates a proposal where the building itself is a beautiful work of art that the community can experience and appreciate.

The three teams present their plans, and while they can certainly see the appeal of each others’ plans, and may even go so far as to complement each other on their plans, for some reason they don’t collaborate to create a beautiful community center where their competition is a work of art.

As IM is a “horizontal” cross-section of gaming as opposed to Big Model’s “vertical” top-down view, sometimes they can express each other’s bits and pieces from a different point of view. Here’s a quick one:

Under IM, you frame scenes so that they will address the current situation. The situation is, in turn, focused (imbuing interaction) from player Goals. If players are pursuing a Creative Agenda, it will reside here, and it will influence their focusing interactions — specifically, if they are playing Narrativist, they will focus the situation to present moral dilemmas; if they are playing Gamist, they will focus the situation to present challenges; if they are playing Simulationist, they’ll focus the situation to highlight a portion of the source material that they want to celebrate (or whatever it is the Sim play does). Once they’ve done that, scenes will proceed to address the moral dilemma, address the challenge, or address the content, fulfilling the CA. It’s another one of those reach-around complements: focusing (imbuing) complemented by steering and framing (articulation).

Recently I’ve become rather disenchanted with Ron Edwards’ Big Model. Specifically, I started getting annoyed at the fetishization that the Big Model seems to inspire at the Forge — all roleplaying games must explicitly and profoundly support one of the approved (or, excuse me, recognized) Creative Agendas or else it’s broken! This led me to start delving into the specifics of the Big Model, at which point I discovered that it only purports to describe “Coherent Roleplay,” defined as roleplay that fulfills a Creative Agenda.

Creative Agendas, in turn, are something of a sociological snapshot, three different ways that roleplayers have been observed to consistently enjoy themselves. Not exactly the most solid foundation to base value judgments on — “Coherent” roleplay includes only roleplay that fulfills one of three desires that have previously been observed. Whether or not there are any other gamer-desires that exist out in the world, or even other gamer-desires that could be fulfilled through roleplaying, is patently overlooked. There is only three “coherent” ways to play, and if you’re not coherent, what the hell is wrong with you?

Now, I should take a moment to step back and make clear that I’m reacting to what I’ve seen in general in most of the posts on the Forge. Ron himself has always been very careful to hold open the possibility of other Creative Agendas and to state that inCoherent roleplay is not necessarily dysfunctional (ie bad) roleplay. So he’s by no means claiming that if you don’t follow his model you’re wrong — it’s just the default assumption of a lot of posters at the Forge. Ironically, they’ve shifted the meaning of Coherence to fit something more like Adherence; the original term meant “make sure you produce what you want to produce” but now it means — functionally — “make sure you produce one of the three approved flavors.”

In any case, my story goes further and the current state of the Forge is only tangentially related. It’s still, for reference, a great place full of good people and a whole ton of resources. I’ll still be reading and posting — I’ll just be reading and posting with a thick dogma filter on.

So it turns out the Big Model is definitionally constrained to only deal with a certain segment of the vast sea of roleplaying. I reflected how much I preferred the old-school GNS Model, with the GNS triangle that attempted to describe all roleplay everywhere on the basis of to what extent the players were interested in Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist modes. Back then, you could play more than one mode at a time. The intent of the GNS essay and subsequent discussions were also broader and more ambitious — the goal was to start talking about roleplaying in precise terms, to explore how it really worked, and to develop better games based on that understanding. The subsequent lexicon that was developed did a great deal for roleplaying game design, and is still kicking out great innovations.

But here’s the thing: ye olde GNS Model is based on the same foundation that the Big Model is. Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism are all observed tropes of behavior and stated desires. The entire model that is supposed to describe roleplaying games is based on the finite results of a survey of the people who play them. After a lot of thrashing it out in my head, I have to conclude that neither model is about roleplaying games at all — they’re about the people who play them. While gaming is a social activity and therefore the players are an important piece, they are not the entire thing. It’s the difference between Siskel & Ebert, who talked about the movies they reviewed, and Entertainment Tonight, which talks about the actors and actresses and their celebrity lives. Siskel & Ebert was about movies — Entertainment Tonight is not.

I don’t want to abandon everything, though — there have demonstrably been insights and improvements, and we have seen great developments. I just think we’re working on a ladder that’s missing a number of rungs and won’t get us to the top floor. Presently I’m working under the theory that Ron did observe something worthwhile in his GNS distinction, but misidentified it, or made too simple of an identification. That some people are interested in Story, some in the Game, and some in the Simulation, might signify that the Story, the Game, and the Simulation are three large aspects of the thing known as roleplaying. Just as everybody has their favorite Spice Girl, most gamers have their favorite aspect of roleplaying. But we can use that picking of favorites as a signpost that those ‘aspects’ exist. The next step, I figure, is to consider these three aspects, how they relate to eachother, and whether there are any other pieces that go into it. Then I’ll try and identify such aspects in as many different kinds of roleplay as I can. Or, you know, I’ll lose interest in it tomorrow.

Such is life.