Theory Glossary And Semantic Debate Thread.

[Levi Kornelsen]

My good Nutkins, should you find this thread deserving of Pigpennery or Parlorization, feel free.

I have this agenda.  It goes like this.  Deliberately unclear speech is rude.  If I didn’t understand what someone said, because of the words they used, and they did it on purpose, that’s rude.  If they used unclear words simply because they didn’t have any clear ones, then that’s just generally sucky, but nobody is at fault there.  RPG theory has a lot of unclear words.  

Note: None of the actual thinking that follows is my own.  Just a few of the words, and not even nearly all of those.

Authority: Authority refers to who has the power to decide things in a game, by whatever method.  If players can just make up unimportant little details of scenery on the fly, they have more authority than the core D&D books might suggest.  If they're constantly getting shifted around by the GM, to the point where the GM dictates a significant amount of what their characters actually do, then the players have less authority than usual.  Authority is split between the players and the materials, and the GM is generally treated much differently than the other players.

Balance: Rules that are balanced provide every player with equal opportunity to have fun during the game, and do what they can to minimise the possibility that one or more players will have fun at the expense of the other player's enjoyment of the game.  How that balance expresses itself has a lot to do with the focus of the game. So depending on the specific game, 'balance' could be all about 'combat effectiveness' or 'spotlight time' or 'influence on how the in-game story develops'.

Consensus: The Consensus is the whole mass of stuff that people bring to the table that they can agree on, whether they actually talk about it or not.  When a group goes over group stuff, they're usually either just clearing up how their consensus works, or adding more stuff to it.  A few other words here:

   Assumption Clash: When something is assumed by the group to be 'settled' in the consensus, but people actually have different ideas about it, it may come out in play, with different people on different sides of "but I thought...".  That's assumption clash.

Buy-In: When you have people at the table, and they're looking at the game material, and they dig it, and they start to have something of their own to do with that material, or that they want to say with it, from inside the game, they've "bought in".  To many established groups, buy-in is all that is really needed to get a consensus rolling.

Rules: Every clearly stated part of the consensus is a rule.  That includes if we roll dice, what dice we roll, and if we re-roll dice that go onto the floor, as well as who buys the pizza, whose house we play at, and so on.

   Mechanics: Mechanics are a specific kind of rule.  A mechanic is a rule that governs and works with numbers, ratings, and such.  A rule that says "a gun does 2d6 damage" is a mechanic.  A rule that says "reroll dice that hit the floor" isn't.

Goals: When players sit down at the table, they have goals.  Things they think would be fun for them.  Some RPG books imply or state that they'll be played with certain goals, and work to serve those goals as the authors saw fit.  Now, it's entirely possible to play a game with a goals it wasn't written for, and even do a great job of it, but plenty of people like their games to be written to back up their goals.  Also, it's sometimes useful to know what goals a game is trying to support before you buy it, play it, or tinker with it.  Here are some goals:

   Theme: Some RPGs have powerful questions or themes that constantly recur, or are built to make it easy to include such stuff.  They ask questions, in a literary-kind-of-sense.  They take characters that have specific things central to those character, and they test those things, with the players experiencing the them by way of their characters.   Dogs in the Vineyard treats strong themes as a goal.  An example theme might be something like “What are you willing to do for power?”, which I’m told is a strong theme in Sorcerer.

Emulation: RPGs that have emulation as a goal have a single genre, setting, or set of source material that they give a lot of service to; the things that happen often in that setting and genre will almost certainly happen often in the game.  Toon emulates cartoons.  Blue Planet emulates, uh, itself, as far as I can tell, but it gives a huge amount of service to doing it.  A genre, like Horror or Noir, can be something to emulate.  

Challenge: Some RPGs present themselves, in play, as a series of challenges to be overcome by character and player.  If you, as a player, are plotting tactics within the game world, and find that the mechanics serve you really well in doing this, chances are you're looking at a game built to support people who consider challenging play to be a goal.  D&D, as written, is pretty challenge-heavy.

Stance: Some games treat a stance (almost always character stance) as a goal.  Plenty of LARP games fall here.  Stances are defined a little further on; we’ll get to those.  

Socialization: For some players, hanging out with friends and having a good time with them is one of the goals they come to the table with.  Most games that serve these goals take a deliberately light approach.  Munchkin d20 fits nicely here, though it's got a whole lot of support for challenges as goals, too (though it comes at them differently).

And More: There's more people, games, and kinds of goals out there than the top letter-count of a post allows.  People want different stuff, and many of them want more than one thing, in different measures.  Rock on.

Stances: While in play, you're making decisions, constantly.   You might be speaking as your character; you might be saying what your guy does.  Lots of different stuff like that.   Those different states are called ‘stances’.   Now, in this theory, people can move from one stance to another in a matter of seconds, but some games work best when played in one stance or combination of stances.

   Author: If you're making decisions around a character or group of characters and their actions, and think about it as if you were writing a book or directing a play - you're detached from the situation, manipulating stuff in it, with a broad viewpoint - you're in author stance.  There's a range of ways to come at this stance; different people are in different mental spaces when they use it.

Character: If you're making decisions as your character, then you're in "Character Stance".  You may be trying to play your character from outside, and representing it by "speaking in character", or you might be aiming to actually take a shot at seeing things from the perspective of your fictional person - something that often gets called "immersion"; there's plenty of internal range in playing as your charater.

Player: If you're making decisions about a character you’re playing and their actions based on reasons that don't have to do with the character's views or perspective, you're in "Player Stance".  Games with solidly tactical combat tend to move players into this stance; here, they can treat the character as a complex playing piece.  Again, there's a range of mental spaces here, ranging from tactical cooperative play to one-upmanship, and so on.


...You want to nit-pick, now, don't you?  


Admit it.


You do.


Go for it.

[Name Lips]

This thread is unbalanced and has a rotten stance.

[Thjalfi]

since you have done any analysis of role playing games whatsoever, you are obviously overintellectualizing the game in an attempt to keep people out of it.

congratulations, I hereby dub you SWINE, and move this thread to the correct forum. :heh:

edit: oh, well, since things aren't working right yet, I guess it can stay here for now.

please, continue - oh, and i'm interested - why isn't "mechanics" a subset of "rules" ?

[Levi Kornelsen]

since you have done any analysis of role playing games whatsoever, you are obviously overintellectualizing the game in an attempt to keep people out of it.

congratulations, I hereby dub you SWINE, and move this thread to the correct forum. :heh:

edit: oh, well, since things aren't working right yet, I guess it can stay here for now.

Heh.  When it works, I'd be amused to have this be a first post.

please, continue - oh, and i'm interested - why isn't "mechanics" a subset of "rules" ?

Uh...  in the text formatting?  Because I forgot to make it one.

[Levi Kornelsen]

This thread is unbalanced and has a rotten stance.

It does not attempt to ensure maximum fun for all participants, and I was unclear on how I was relating to my character?

Rubbish!

[Thjalfi]

Uh...  in the text formatting?  Because I forgot to make it one.

Fixed it for you!

oh, you should be able to post here now too.

[Cowardly Leech]

So many bolded terms, but why?

Does this really help you play?

[Levi Kornelsen]

Does this really help you play?

When I have a player that wants something from the game, and can't figure out how to tell me what it is, yes.

[Maddman]

So many bolded terms, but why?

Does this really help you play?

Seriously for a second, while I am poking fun at both RPGPundit and the Forgites with my SWINE talk, I have used gaming theory to help my game.  It helped me figure out why my old group wasn't working.  I've also tried putting themes into the games, and found that it helps keep the game focused and paying lots of attention to the characters.  Result has been some awesome games.

So yes, for me thinking about theory has helped my games.  But I don't take them all that seriously.

[Thjalfi]

Seriously for a second, while I am poking fun at both RPGPundit and the Forgites with my SWINE talk, I have used gaming theory to help my game.  It helped me figure out why my old group wasn't working.  I've also tried putting themes into the games, and found that it helps keep the game focused and paying lots of attention to the characters.  Result has been some awesome games.

So yes, for me thinking about theory has helped my games.  But I don't take them all that seriously.

Serious is good too - And I did enjoy your essay on conflict and the applications of gaming. I would still like to see you continue to work on gaming theory - Even when I don't agree, it's generally a good read.

Different viewpoints are a good thing to have, they make the world much more interesting.

[shooting_dice]

It's decent to define your terms, but really, this kindn of thing should be done along with your own theory, not an attempt to define what words mean for everybody. Since definitions are in themselves a slant, if everybody agrees you end up with the kind of wanking on the Forge, where the terms only mean what they need to mean to support their theories and have little relationship to how people use the words in everyday gaming.

[Levi Kornelsen]

It's decent to define your terms, but really, this kindn of thing should be done along with your own theory, not an attempt to define what words mean for everybody.

This is a theory.

[shooting_dice]

This is a theory.

It's a position. How does this tell me why or how things happen?

[Levi Kornelsen]

It's a position. How does this tell me why or how things happen?

Uh...

Why: Things in games happen because people do them, motivated by their goals and the consensus their group has on how play should work.

How: Things in games happen however the group agrees; that's what a consensus is.  Generally, according to discussion, rules, and mechanics.

Maybe I'm not catching what you mean?

[shooting_dice]

Uh...

Why: Things in games happen because people do them, motivated by their goals and the consensus their group has on how play should work.

How: Things in games happen however the group agrees; that's what a consensus is.  Generally, according to discussion, rules, and mechanics.

Maybe I'm not catching what you mean?

Well, a theory is really more of an intellectual structure that is involved with hows and whys. Terms are used to provide the facets of a theory, but I think a full theory, as opposed to a slant, is a bit more involved. The only exception is if your theory is about deconstructing or playing with the meanings of terms, or charting their historical transformations.