Brain Dump

This post has been in the works for a while, but Neel Krishnaswami articulated much of what I was going to say extremely well in a comment in the 20 by 20 Room discussion A Little Bit About Context:

o the setting description in the rulebook
o the rules of the rpg
o the GM’s notes about the game setting
o each player’s writeups of their PCs
o each player’s logs or journals about the game
o the improvisations and rulings accumulated during play

Usually, none of these will be consistent with any of the others! (Eg, the setting material in the rulebook includes references to wizards doing things that cannot be supported according to the game rules.) So a critical activity in game *play* is resolving inconsistencies between the different texts — that is, how the participants choose a normative interpretation out of all of the stuff created to date. IMO, a lot of what we call a “style of roleplaying” is just having different priorities about which are the master texts of the roleplaying game, and also when each takes priority.

Emotionally, I don’t come out of an rpg session with the idea that I understood what was going on at a deep level, in the same way as all the other players. Back in Boston, for one of my groups I was the writeup guy who put stuff on the web. Doing this pretty much cured me of the notion that I saw pretty much the same game, because the act of writing up a game helped jog my memory of the things that the players did while writing, and while doing every single writeup I found that way more significant dramatic action had taken place than I consciously remembered as significant. (Signficicant, as in, “Oh cr-p, she IS being mind-controlled by vampires!”)

So after having my nose rubbed in this fact 150 times or so, I was finally convinced that we won’t all be on the same page about a game, any more than we’ll be on the same page about a movie we all saw. That’s okay though, because yammering about our differing interpretations is hella fun.

Neel is pointing to something extremely important here: the narrative generated in a roleplaying session is much like the narrative generated in any other medium.  That is, they are open to interpretation.  This is due to the fact that it is simply not possible for a narrative to include all the relevant facts.  Things are just too complex for that.  So, instead, the narrative leaves holes for you to fill in.

In roleplaying this is complicated by the fact that the audience is in the position of the author as well.  This means that each player has a sort of authorial authority that lends itself to their specific filling in of those holes.  The ability to say ‘When I said X, I intended it to be in support of idea Y’ is an important one.  The social power dynamics of author-audience are rather confused in roleplaying because everyone is an author and everyone is the audience.

But this turns out to be a good thing!  Uncertainty of this sort is what allows us to enjoy stories in different ways, and what allows us to enjoy the same stories despite our different backgrounds.  And as Neel says at the end of his comment: it can be tons of fun comparing our interpretations.  I mean, I love explaining how I thought a character was being a jerk because I interpreted his actions in one way, while someone else thought the character was being heroic because they interpreted his actions totally differently.

The point of all this is that all authority distribution is about who’s version of the filled-in story we are going to use at any given time.  In ‘traditional’ play, this authority is divided up at the beginning of the game, and then locked.  One person has authorial authority over each aspect of the game.  No element is authored by two players.  Whenever any question about what a character’s motivations ‘really were’ arises, every player knows to turn to a single person for the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ answer.

A lot of more recent games have played with distributing this authority in a different way.  Specifically, authority over any given element varies based on a number of different factors, intead of being fixed at the beginning of play.  In Universalis authority belongs to whoever has most recently paid for it.  In Polaris authority is based on who is currently the Heart/Mistaken/New Moon/Full Moon as well as which ritual phrases have been recently employed.

I know I am not saying anything new or revolutionary here.  But I do think that, as much as we talk about authority distribution, we rarely think about what it really means.  The authority we are distributing is that of the author.  What we are divvying up is who gets to say what ‘officially’ happens in disputes.

One thing that is important to remember is that just because you have the authority to fill in a hole, does not mean that it will happen.  It may never get brought to anyone’s attention that there is a dispute.  While you may have been given the authority to decide motivations for a specific character, that does not prevent me from ascribing my own motivations to them if you do not make yours explicit.

Which leads me to an interesting question: how often in play do we specifically not seek clarification on an issue, how often do we fail to ask the authority what the official position is because we don’t want it clarified?  How much of our play involves skirting around official pronouncements because we are completely happy with our own private interpretations?

Tags: Dense-post, Theory

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 05:28 and is filed under musings. 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.