Back in early April there was a brief flurry of activity discussing “out of the box” games. Joshua BishopRoby summed things up nicely in What is Out-of-the-Box?. It is not really necessary for you to have read all of that in order to follow what I am going to talk about here, but it is a bit of context you may find useful.
Last week I talked about Taking a load off, and this turns out to have implications for the way people learn to game. In narrative play, mechanics help to effeciently drive play toward the good stuff, but because different people consider different things to be the “good stuff” this process is necessarily player directed.
Dogs in the Vineyard is my go-to game to point out a lot of really good procedural stuff. The rules are very clear about what input is needed from players and where that input slots into the mechanics. For instance, the town creation rules ask you to think of a Pride that is the heart of a town’s problems, and then consider what Injustice that leads to, and so on in an escalating line.
The problem is that players can not know for sure just how compelling their choices will be until they have played for a bit. Some things seems like a great idea in theory, but once you get them into practice you realize that they just do not work. Of course the rules of a game can help to focus your attention on a narrower number of options (“an instance of pride” is more specific than “an instance of wrongdoing”, and as such gives you a narrower field to get good at evaluating), but the rules can not make you pick something compelling.
Another place to see this in action is in Dogs in the Vineyard‘s conflict resolution rules. The first step is to set stakes. The rules tell you how to set stakes, but they quite literally can not tell you how to set good stakes. They do point the way toward some indicators of good (and bad) stakes, but they can not do more than that. This is because the value of any set of stakes is idiosyncratic to the group and the specific situation of play. Sometimes “Do you kill him?” is interesting, sometimes it is not.
Dogs in the Vineyard‘s rules do not tell you how to evaluate stakes for conflict to see if they are any good or not (it is entirely possible that no rules can possibly tell you such a thing, I do not know for sure). The result of this is that the learning curve for playing Dogs in the Vineyard is steeper than it may first appear. You can learn all the rules and still not be able to play.
This phenomenon is not unique to roleplaying games at all, in fact you see it all over the place in sports. Knowing the rules of basketball does not mean you suddenly know how to dribble or shoot a layup. However, most people come to roleplaying games and think of them as analagous to board games. In board games, unlike in sports, the time it takes to acquire non-procedural skills is negligible. If you have never rolled and read a die before, well, it turns out that there simply is not much skill involved. Never looked something up on a chart? Never drawn and interpretted a card? Both pretty simple.
All of this helps in thinking about roleplaying in two ways. First, it helps to explain at least part of why people are resistant to learning new games. New games are not easy to pick up, there exists an entire set of techniques and skills which the rules just don’t explain. Further, it is okay that roleplaying games work like that. They are not suddenly defective games, they just are not quite the type of games we had thought them to be.
The second thing considering roleplaying as more analagous to sports than board games does is that it can help us in presenting our games. It makes us more aware that there are skills that we are not teaching, and further it makes us aware that there are skills involved that simply take time to learn. This is an important thing to keep in mind as both players of roleplaying games and as writers and designers of roleplaying games.
This analogy also lets us consider ways to utilize skills from game to game. We might, for instance, consider entire classes of games based on the skills that they assume you already have. This is similar to the way that basketball, baseball, and football assume that you already know how to run and throw a ball.
This may also be a good way to understand why people often enjoy similar groups of games (such as the fact that many people who like games that come out of the design philosophy of the Forge like more than one Forge game). Families of games re-use similar un-taught skills. This means that the skills you had to learn to play (say) Dogs in the VIneyard are similar to the skills you need to play (say) Primetime Adventures. Not identical, of course, but the skills similar enough that you are not starting off from scratch, which is a big deal.
So, next time you find yourself tempted to think of roleplaying games as board games, stop and remember that there are some important, and difficult to learn, skills that you are not teaching.
Next week: Push and Pull, my take on the nebulous distinction.
Tags: Theory
That’s some good stuff, there. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to articulate the interconnectedness of different roleplaying games, and how the default assumption seems to be that they are all the same activity when they really, really aren’t. I’ve been thinking about sports, with each one requiring a different set of skills, some of which are common (running, throwing, hitting, skating), but your article here has helped crystallize that.
Do you think there is any use in trying to list out and identify some-or-all of the skills involved, much like we’ve taken apart “GM Tasks”? We can talk about individual techniques such as Stakes Setting and Scene Framing, but also the more basic stuff like Character Motivation or even Speaking in Character.
Joshua,
YES! I think there is tons of value to be had in identifying the tasks involved. The things that “just are what roleplaying is”. For two major reasons. First, identifying things lets us better learn and teach them. Once we recognize that “Scene Framing” is a complex skill, we can start coming up with ways to teach people to do it better. Second, identifying things means that we can think about what happens if we change them. If “Setting Stakes” is an important part of play, what happens if we do it in this radically different way.
The problem is that I don’t really know where to start. I mean, look at my two examples: Scene Framing, Stakes Setting? Someone else identified those as important for me, I sure didn’t know how to parse them out by myself. By the same token, consider how much more fun I (at least) have been having once I recognized both of those two things as explicit skills in play. How much more fun would I have if I recognized other key bits of play in the same way?
Thomas
First off, dude, your shrinking-font format makes my eyes cry.
Secondly, the place to start is probably with those lovely Nine Worlds audio recordings. Listen, and as you go, identify as many Player-Skills as you hear happening.
Or, screw that, I’m starting a thread on Story-Games.
Player Skills — Brainstorm
This seems closely related to I was talking about in my I don’t get this game of baseball entry.
But there’s another aspect to this. Sometimes it isn’t just the procedure that’s opaque: the overall motivation may also be unclear. With most boardgames, we can fall back on fundamental notions of winning & losing; we can also rely on pure mechanical (ludological) enjoyment and work outward. But with RPGs, the question of “why” we want to do anything in the game may be much less clear to the newcomer.
Elliot,
Right on. Both points. I don’t have anything to add beyond that, though at some point I’d love to discuss the motivations thing.
Thomas