defecation enthusiast

@iojg

102 posts

Here's a conversation with Vincent Baker and Ron Edwards it's mostly about how young people are approach Apocalypse World but there's a bit in the middle about self-expression. Vincent is taking art classes and was apparently challenged by one of his instructors to "draw something he cares about." Both Vincent and Ron relate this back to RPGs and how we should play and design games around things we care about. I think about this a lot and how it relates to me. I feel very alienated from a lot of my fellow RPG players and designers as I feel like everything is either BOMBASTIC FANTASY AESTEHTICS (with not a lot of substance behind it) or really bizarre high concepts that feel internet memes or SNL skits that don't seem really playable. "You're racoons delivering mail in a world ruled by vampire squirrels" or "a solo journaling game about a glass of water that gets off on being drunk but suffers from rejection sensitivity when they are inevitably being peed out." Like... what is even going on here? Now this feeling of alienation from my fellow creatives is not new. I make video games for a living and don't like 90% of most major video game titles. My video games tastes are rather niche (except when they aren't like Silent Hill 2 and Disco Elysium). But like, I've never been big into Anime, I don't care for most Y.A. stuff, I'm not big on the modern construction of Urban Fantasy. I've never been a huge Sci-Fi guy. Superhero stuff never spoke to me. I don't like most contemporary takes on fantasy. So what do I like? I like crime and detective fiction. I like most standalone horror novels. I like Gothics both with and without supernatural elements. I like fantasy novels where the protagonists and the world are like 90% normal except for its most demon haunted corners. (I once heard the description "adventurous horror stories" and thought that was prefect). I like surrealism that is left unexplained but still reveals the truth of the characters. But more than anything I like plays. When I really reflect on things, the biggest influences on me creatively have been plays or movies based on plays. Like the best thing I've seen in the last month was a play about a guy who gets a job at a bank and ends up winning employee of the year (there's more to it than that, but not really). I started watching the original Dark Shadows and I really like the 150 so episodes before they introduced all the supernatural stuff because it felt like one long extended play. I think I even said, "This is my ideal RPG pacing". And that's really it. I like stuff about ordinary people experiencing extraordinary circumstances. And that's getting really, really hard to find in RPGs.

also loved that conversation. listening to them two talking is always a delight, they balance each other out very well. anyway, you are so real for speaking on this. though i think the current trends which you pinned down very comprehensively actually follow the larger tendency of the medium to be driven by emulating genre fiction in the worst sense possible. like, at best it actually comes to doing something unique with genre, like apocalypse world, which i think vincent baker spoke of as being transformative rather than emulative, with which i agree whole-heatedly. or maybe something like sorcerer, which pins down a couple of particular idioms (sorcery in pulp horror/fantasy, demons as metaphors) and follows them through. but that still ultimately kinda drives you towards genre fiction, especially because the game-rules kinda establish a sub-genre in themselves, right? what really baffles me personally is the utter lack of games that set out to be just straight up realist, not in the sense of verisimilitude but in the sense of being about something non-fantastical and non-exotic. i know people love to dunk on genre/literary distinction, but imho if anything ttrpgs are a great testimony to it being fairly useful. like, more of the time you get something vaguely "slice of life", which is actually genre fiction too, and goes with you talking about not being into anime and ya, and the answer given to you about "cozy" fiction. and then there's historical fiction, which too tends to calcify into its own subgenres. and also crime and mystery, or, marginally, some things like war or spy thrillers. nothing really *fits*. you *do* get some things, like paul czege's excellent nicotine girls, but not much! i think it has to do mostly with pitching it. a game centered around pure character drama has to justify its existence either by presenting an incredibly interesting situation (which is what realist fiction mostly thrives on, actually! well, this and compelling characters, obviously) or having some interesting mechanics, both of which is really hard to market for for different reasons, as far as i understand. and even then, can you do a full-book-size game out of this? the aforementioned nicotine girls is a two-pager, but two-pager booklets are not what people buy, the industry is centered around big, lushly illustrated coffee-table books. i wish there were games structured like dogs in the vineyard but sans the fantastical parts. or maybe even like in a wicked age. in fact, the latter would be so good just with modern mundane oracles. i wish the hobby was not so nerd-culture-centered. and it's not like i don't enjoy genre fiction myself. it's just so oppressive how much it's all dominated by tropes. aren't people tired of that in commercial fiction? don't they want to make something different? i remember the passage from sorcerer & sword about doing the things sword & sorcery doesn't really do, angling towards the stuff you are frustrated about, the opportunities passed on. something like that is also in the monsterhearts book. i wish more rpg texts were encouraging this. someone needs to launch something like a realist game jam. anyway, sorry if i've driven the conversation away to some extent. just really needed to vent about all of this after reading the conversation you had in replies.

I think fandom/gaming's obsession with "tropes" especially structural tropes like specific kinds of "arcs" and "reveals" is one of the most toxic things to happen to media in general. It's basically people having completely internalized consumer culture on an identity level.

Over on Adept Play we've completely replaced the word "genre" with "idiom" which is used exactly as you point out for Apocalypse World, Sorcerer & Sword and Monsterhearts. It's when you take the raw components of your inspirations but then fully use them to your own ends to go above and beyond "genre".

As for naturalist games. There are some games that go full naturalist with no supernatural elements. A lot of them are detective games that have refused to introduced the "but with monsters!" element so many games do. Dirty Secrets A Taste For Murder Dirty World

But probably the best naturalist slice of life game I've played in recent times is "Shine A Light" from Ron's Cantos collection: https://payhip.com/b/xEnH1

It's about a close nit group of 20 somethings hanging out. And that's it. That's the entirety of the "situation". There's much talk in the game about Angels but they're entirely metaphorical. They're when moments of death intrude into the lives the characters. And that's it. It starts nowhen and ends nowhen and is punctuated by little moments of tragedy. It's delightful.

thanks for the answer & the recs! i actually lurk adept play, so i have been exposed to the approbation of the "idiom" for the ttrpg-discourse a-plenty. i agree it's a very constructive use of terminology. also thanks for pointing out monsterhearts, it's actually such a good third example i'm kinda jealous i didn't though of it myself! i didn't really mean naturalist games, to be honest. i was very deliberate with choosing to write "realist" despite it being abused. i really did mean it in a sense of "deliberately mundane", concerning itself with a "real life" in the sense of being about matters close to lived experience of the author and/or the intended recipients. i don't really read or watch that much mystery fiction, it's not really my think. and it actually is kinda preoccupied with tropes and exotic matters, usually, as far as i can say! so it's part of the whole thing. i really wanna check out shine a light now though, you described it rather attractively. though honestly "slice of life" is still really not what i am looking for. like, im pursuing an eng lit degree right now after getting my history master's. so as part of that, i am reading a lot of postmodern realist fiction. and i am wracking my brain on how and what one would even codify design-wise to get at *that* kind of thing in rpgs. i think one would need to do something like drama system, honestly, but different, because that game seems entirely preoccupied with conch-passing. but then i don't know *what* exactly the game would need to support and enforce. both pursuing the structure of "a novel" in a traditional sense or pinning it down to a very specific situation/setting seems kinda bad, too direct maybe, like you are taking away the interesting part from the actual play. and i really thing -- it's a quirk, maybe i am unreasonable for that -- that it gotta be a fully-realized, big game, not a small proof of concept one. the latter was for sure done, i've seen it being done. i just wish i had a satisfying example. i fully believe the day something gonna write something like that will be *the* day for the medium. or at least it's gonna be one for me as a rpg enthusiast

Here's a conversation with Vincent Baker and Ron Edwards it's mostly about how young people are approach Apocalypse World but there's a bit in the middle about self-expression. Vincent is taking art classes and was apparently challenged by one of his instructors to "draw something he cares about." Both Vincent and Ron relate this back to RPGs and how we should play and design games around things we care about. I think about this a lot and how it relates to me. I feel very alienated from a lot of my fellow RPG players and designers as I feel like everything is either BOMBASTIC FANTASY AESTEHTICS (with not a lot of substance behind it) or really bizarre high concepts that feel internet memes or SNL skits that don't seem really playable. "You're racoons delivering mail in a world ruled by vampire squirrels" or "a solo journaling game about a glass of water that gets off on being drunk but suffers from rejection sensitivity when they are inevitably being peed out." Like... what is even going on here? Now this feeling of alienation from my fellow creatives is not new. I make video games for a living and don't like 90% of most major video game titles. My video games tastes are rather niche (except when they aren't like Silent Hill 2 and Disco Elysium). But like, I've never been big into Anime, I don't care for most Y.A. stuff, I'm not big on the modern construction of Urban Fantasy. I've never been a huge Sci-Fi guy. Superhero stuff never spoke to me. I don't like most contemporary takes on fantasy. So what do I like? I like crime and detective fiction. I like most standalone horror novels. I like Gothics both with and without supernatural elements. I like fantasy novels where the protagonists and the world are like 90% normal except for its most demon haunted corners. (I once heard the description "adventurous horror stories" and thought that was prefect). I like surrealism that is left unexplained but still reveals the truth of the characters. But more than anything I like plays. When I really reflect on things, the biggest influences on me creatively have been plays or movies based on plays. Like the best thing I've seen in the last month was a play about a guy who gets a job at a bank and ends up winning employee of the year (there's more to it than that, but not really). I started watching the original Dark Shadows and I really like the 150 so episodes before they introduced all the supernatural stuff because it felt like one long extended play. I think I even said, "This is my ideal RPG pacing". And that's really it. I like stuff about ordinary people experiencing extraordinary circumstances. And that's getting really, really hard to find in RPGs.

also loved that conversation. listening to them two talking is always a delight, they balance each other out very well. anyway, you are so real for speaking on this. though i think the current trends which you pinned down very comprehensively actually follow the larger tendency of the medium to be driven by emulating genre fiction in the worst sense possible. like, at best it actually comes to doing something unique with genre, like apocalypse world, which i think vincent baker spoke of as being transformative rather than emulative, with which i agree whole-heatedly. or maybe something like sorcerer, which pins down a couple of particular idioms (sorcery in pulp horror/fantasy, demons as metaphors) and follows them through. but that still ultimately kinda drives you towards genre fiction, especially because the game-rules kinda establish a sub-genre in themselves, right? what really baffles me personally is the utter lack of games that set out to be just straight up realist, not in the sense of verisimilitude but in the sense of being about something non-fantastical and non-exotic. i know people love to dunk on genre/literary distinction, but imho if anything ttrpgs are a great testimony to it being fairly useful. like, more of the time you get something vaguely "slice of life", which is actually genre fiction too, and goes with you talking about not being into anime and ya, and the answer given to you about "cozy" fiction. and then there's historical fiction, which too tends to calcify into its own subgenres. and also crime and mystery, or, marginally, some things like war or spy thrillers. nothing really *fits*. you *do* get some things, like paul czege's excellent nicotine girls, but not much! i think it has to do mostly with pitching it. a game centered around pure character drama has to justify its existence either by presenting an incredibly interesting situation (which is what realist fiction mostly thrives on, actually! well, this and compelling characters, obviously) or having some interesting mechanics, both of which is really hard to market for for different reasons, as far as i understand. and even then, can you do a full-book-size game out of this? the aforementioned nicotine girls is a two-pager, but two-pager booklets are not what people buy, the industry is centered around big, lushly illustrated coffee-table books. i wish there were games structured like dogs in the vineyard but sans the fantastical parts. or maybe even like in a wicked age. in fact, the latter would be so good just with modern mundane oracles. i wish the hobby was not so nerd-culture-centered. and it's not like i don't enjoy genre fiction myself. it's just so oppressive how much it's all dominated by tropes. aren't people tired of that in commercial fiction? don't they want to make something different? i remember the passage from sorcerer & sword about doing the things sword & sorcery doesn't really do, angling towards the stuff you are frustrated about, the opportunities passed on. something like that is also in the monsterhearts book. i wish more rpg texts were encouraging this. someone needs to launch something like a realist game jam. anyway, sorry if i've driven the conversation away to some extent. just really needed to vent about all of this after reading the conversation you had in replies.

contemptible-scoundrel

it's not surprising, of course. to many, a dog being euthanized for attacking a person is a tragedy. poor thing was in a bad environment you see, it didn't deserve to die. and to many, every criminal should be put to death. they are inherently cruel and cannot change, any sentence more lenient than death is an injustice to their victims. why might a dog maul someone? well clearly the poor thing was a victim, it was circumstance that spurred it to violence. why might a person mug someone? clearly they have a corrupt soul, incapable and unworthy of empathy. they were spurred to criminality by their own sick nature. so to say, in their eyes, a human criminal is less human than a dog

i dont really understand the thrust of this post. dogs who maul humans are in fact killed. that is the actual system we live under. people who like to engage in bloodlust towards human petty criminals, are, i think generally going to be people who don't really have a problem with that (if nothing else, because the vast majority do not) - they might think it sad. probably you can find someone who is the contradiction here, there are a lot of idiosyncrasies in ghoulishness. but what is this world where everyone always, always, wants to talk about how dogs or other nonhuman animals supposedly get anything better? because we dont live in a world where that is how it really plays out, and i am not convinced this is some enormous consistent or load bearing feature of what any substantial number of people believe? and... "its sad, but you are a dangerous beast who needs to be put down to protect others" is something that gets said about humans on occasion too. generally only from the most openly vile people. and like... its really just trying to paint a sympathetic voice over the most naked kind of murderousness

it's a goomba phallacy, yeah

balaclava-trismegistus

watching how much sam levinson hates women who do sex work unfold in s3 of Euphoria, which came out in Current Year, is also making me consider how genuinely radical it is to think it's actually fucking cool if somebody gets paid to take drugs and get gangbanged for a living because they want to.

no idea about euphoria, but idk, don't you think being altered and then put into a situation in which clear communication is hard (a lot of people) and transgressions is easy (a lot of people) is kinda conductive to rape. don't get me wrong, people want to do dangerous stuff all of the time, it's just that this particular scenario aligns with systemic violence towards women

balaclava-trismegistus

Some people like doing drugs and getting gangbanged. There is literally nothing wrong with that.

it would be fucking cool if people opining about sex work considered viewing sex workers as capable of making informed decisions including safety contingencies instead of idk clueless babes stumbling onto porn sets by accident. yes we're aware intoxicated sex with multiple people is 'kinda conducive to rape' i'm not sure how you think this could possibly be news to anyone much less the person actually planning to be paid to do that. that's why we take steps to protect ourselves. not that civvies will ever choose to believe that when they could instead offer their insights about how violence is a possibility

ive been thinking how to respond to you for a while, but if you don't see any value in my response, please just ignore it, i won't take offence. after all, i have managed to boil down my concern to a simple line an inquiry: do you think you can confidently say "we" here, actually? i won't deny, maybe you are in position to make informed, considered decisions, i can well imagine that. but do you think that's like, true generally enough for sex workers as a whole? and i mean that, shouldn't one first think of people who are prostituted, doing survival sex work, getting trafficked, etc. before one considers the position of a person generally empowered to manage their work as something with which they are baseline comfortable and by doing which they are generally safe? how common is *that*, really? and how common is the reverse? and then, and this is gonna sound silly, but bear with me: don't you think atleast some of the people involved in sex work are just, plainly, not as smart as you? i am not being condescending, i consider myself quite slow and inattentive, generally better with reflection than situational thinking, and i had majorly fucked up, endangered others and injured myself, doing some harsh physical labor before. if i would been having sex for money, i most likely would walk into a situation with obvious signs of danger of sexual (or otherwise) assault without noticing them. surely you don't think people like me don't do sex work or are not common enough to be worthy of consideration? and i think, generally, that prostitution is associated with a myriad of factors that make people less able to function at their cognitive best. disassociation, drug use, poverty are not things that help a person think clearly. i hope you can see im at least trying to think and talk about this from a place of empathy and genuine concern, and not some abstract self-righteous ideation

balaclava-trismegistus

watching how much sam levinson hates women who do sex work unfold in s3 of Euphoria, which came out in Current Year, is also making me consider how genuinely radical it is to think it's actually fucking cool if somebody gets paid to take drugs and get gangbanged for a living because they want to.

no idea about euphoria, but idk, don't you think being altered and then put into a situation in which clear communication is hard (a lot of people) and transgressions is easy (a lot of people) is kinda conductive to rape. don't get me wrong, people want to do dangerous stuff all of the time, it's just that this particular scenario aligns with systemic violence towards women

balaclava-trismegistus

Some people like doing drugs and getting gangbanged. There is literally nothing wrong with that.

darkenedyeastextract

also commenter, the scenarios most conductive to rape are actually the family unit, the church, and the workplace/school but that’s a conversation you’re probably not ready to have.

yeah that's just presumptuous on your part. also what kinda argument is that. the situations you describe are very broad, of course they will be statistically likely to lead to rape. it's like saying, oh, most people who are likely to rape you are relatives and friends, so the chances of being raped by a serial killer (or something) are not that high, to a person who is being actively stalked by said serial killer. yeah, it's statistically true, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to recommend people to like, get into a specific situation with a big "rape" sign over it. it's only less likely because not many people are in situation like that, compared to literally almost anyone being vulnerable due to trusting close ones and authority figures. but once you do sex work, you will most likely get raped at some point, and being raped by a john becomes way more probable than being preyed on by a non-client. it seems pretty reasonable not to recommend it as a vocation to anybody you don't want to get sexually assaulted.

darkenedyeastextract

it's like saying, oh, most people who are likely to rape you are relatives and friends, so the chances of being raped by a serial killer (or something) are not that high, to a person who is being actively stalked by said serial killer.

if you're currently in an altered state and having a train run on you, you should probably be focused on that and not blogging

please try to actually converse instead of trying to one up in that insufferable masturbatory fashion. otherwise, have the last word if you so need it, but i won't respond to a snide remark like that a second time

balaclava-trismegistus

watching how much sam levinson hates women who do sex work unfold in s3 of Euphoria, which came out in Current Year, is also making me consider how genuinely radical it is to think it's actually fucking cool if somebody gets paid to take drugs and get gangbanged for a living because they want to.

no idea about euphoria, but idk, don't you think being altered and then put into a situation in which clear communication is hard (a lot of people) and transgressions is easy (a lot of people) is kinda conductive to rape. don't get me wrong, people want to do dangerous stuff all of the time, it's just that this particular scenario aligns with systemic violence towards women

balaclava-trismegistus

Some people like doing drugs and getting gangbanged. There is literally nothing wrong with that.

darkenedyeastextract

also commenter, the scenarios most conductive to rape are actually the family unit, the church, and the workplace/school but that’s a conversation you’re probably not ready to have.

yeah that's just presumptuous on your part. also what kinda argument is that. the situations you describe are very broad, of course they will be statistically likely to lead to rape. it's like saying, oh, most people who are likely to rape you are relatives and friends, so the chances of being raped by a serial killer (or something) are not that high, to a person who is being actively stalked by said serial killer. yeah, it's statistically true, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to recommend people to like, get into a specific situation with a big "rape" sign over it. it's only less likely because not many people are in situation like that, compared to literally almost anyone being vulnerable due to trusting close ones and authority figures. but once you do sex work, you will most likely get raped at some point, and being raped by a john becomes way more probable than being preyed on by a non-client. it seems pretty reasonable not to recommend it as a vocation to anybody you don't want to get sexually assaulted.

balaclava-trismegistus

watching how much sam levinson hates women who do sex work unfold in s3 of Euphoria, which came out in Current Year, is also making me consider how genuinely radical it is to think it's actually fucking cool if somebody gets paid to take drugs and get gangbanged for a living because they want to.

no idea about euphoria, but idk, don't you think being altered and then put into a situation in which clear communication is hard (a lot of people) and transgressions is easy (a lot of people) is kinda conductive to rape. don't get me wrong, people want to do dangerous stuff all of the time, it's just that this particular scenario aligns with systemic violence towards women

balaclava-trismegistus

Some people like doing drugs and getting gangbanged. There is literally nothing wrong with that.

yeah, i know some people like it. i dont have anything against them. but i think it is very reasonable to be suspicious about people getting enthusiastic about someone wanting to do drugs and get gangbanged. like, one must notice how in leftist circles its common for people to prioritise only the kinda "women's rights" discourse that coincides with them getting to fuck aforementioned women more easily, regularly and conveniently

balaclava-trismegistus

watching how much sam levinson hates women who do sex work unfold in s3 of Euphoria, which came out in Current Year, is also making me consider how genuinely radical it is to think it's actually fucking cool if somebody gets paid to take drugs and get gangbanged for a living because they want to.

no idea about euphoria, but idk, don't you think being altered and then put into a situation in which clear communication is hard (a lot of people) and transgressions is easy (a lot of people) is kinda conductive to rape. don't get me wrong, people want to do dangerous stuff all the time, it's just that this particular scenario aligns with systemic violence towards women

The anticommunist nonsense about how all communists imagine they’ll be cushy bureaucrats was always so funny to me. The only job I’ve ever found enjoyable was working in a kitchen and I would absolutely be happy to do that as my main occupation if I didn’t have to worry about stupid shit like rent and bills and I was just expected to make my contribution to society by feeding people. Instead I have to live in the world run by Epsteinian morons where there are no jobs for most people and the “best” jobs are the most parasitic wasteful nonsense ever mostly focused on making the world worse for everyone else. The bread lines thing is even funnier bc now I live in a world where most of my income is being wasted by price gouging department stores for products that are only declining in quality

you're so real for saying this. i would just do construction or road work the rest of my life if it payed well for non-life-destroying amount of hours because who wouldn't, it's very chill when it's chill. but no, you either have to rot in an office, waste away to a point of disability, or starve.

I swear to God, so much RPG discourse is, “We should write complex formal procedures for basic human interactions that everyone seems to manage just fine in every other social activity on Earth except this one for some reason.”

Okay, there has been enough confusion about this, I feel the need to clarify. I'm not talking about in-game character-to-character social resolution procedures. A lot of those are fine. I actually like those in some cases. I'm talking about stuff that formally manages how the real-world players interact to make sure everyone gets along and plays nice. Real kindergarten stuff.

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.

For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it. No. Just. Stop. Don't do that. Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back. In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.

i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?

Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.

I'm usually a huge fan of fantasy/sci-fi logistics, groundedness, biology, etc., but this is also how you get people constantly trying to "solve" vampires by saying "well they drink blood so that means they are scientifically hematophages and there is no problem with them drinking blood of any animal because other hematophages can drink the blood of any animal" and "if it's transmissible by bite that means it's a virus or bacteria that causes a mutation."

No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.

Sometimes the answer isn't "it's magic" because the author hasn't thought about it, sometimes the answer is "it's magic" because the author has thought about it.

Exactly. You can pick and choose. In fact, supernatural things become MORE scary when they operate spiritually when everything else operates realistically. Yup, the world works exactly the way we believe it to, oh except this *thing*. This thing is unbounded by reality. It has uncomfortable existential implications or reaches into questions that have no answers. That's scary.

see I firmly disagree with this approach.

Roleplaying games are, ultimately, games about making meaningful decisions in a fictional setting. For your players' decisions to be meaningful, their outcomes can't be arbitrary, and so when their decisions interact with some aspect of the setting, that aspect of the setting must follow consistant principles.

These principles don't need to be rational, scientific ones, of course. They can operate on magical thinking and symbolism, or associative dream-logic, but they should be something. If there's nothing but vibes, then it becomes much harder to have consistant, meaningful and satisfying interactions with anything that operates that way.

To take the example given, "How does jade armour and ruby thrones make you feel" is a fine idea until you have a player character who wants to play, say, a jewel thief. Then, suddenly, the way a culture uses jade and rubies, and where they get them from, matter a great deal. "Why would you actually wear jade armour" becomes a very important question to answer when, say, a player character puts on a suit of stolen jade armour.

I think the key thing is that the more you expect something to be interacted with in play, the more you actually need to reason out how it works. An evocative background element that's never the focus of play can be handwaved so long as the vibes are right, but the closer something becomes to the focus of play, the more consistent the principles it works by need to be.

By and large, I'd say a good rule of thumb is to think through one more layer of detail than players will ask questions about something. Anything the players won't actually interact with directly can go below the abstraction layer, but the more interaction you expect, the more thought you want to put into how it all fits together.

Basically, a good roleplaying setting is one which feels fleshed out and lived in. It's that old cliche of verisimilitude, innit?

the rules might not be diegetic though. the players might do decisions based upon information that is not present to their characters, and which actually doesn't work on the level of their characters at all. a lot of fiction is actually structured around such desparities. in ttrpg context, specifically horro, murderous ghosts is really great for demonstrating that

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.

For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it. No. Just. Stop. Don't do that. Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back. In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.

i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?

Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.

yeah, i totally see what you mean. i think in ttrpgs in particular the pressure to ask mostly stems from the gm needing to adjudicate players trying to strategize diegetically, which is something that a lot of otherwise stellar games do. i had this particular trouble in sorcerer with bonus for tactical moves, until i restated the rules for myself from the first principles. also remember apocalypse world and it's note about gasoline evaporating. nevertheless, i think i generally prefer fiction that actually engages with material particularities of the world. notably, talking about myth, iliad and odyssey very much do so, to an extent of seemingly altering whatever the original scope was to present kings and kingship as very rich farmers, turning them into something that makes sense to their audience. at the same time, everything concerning gods is obviously strictly impressionstic and metaphorical there, and that seems exactly right, just as with your horror example. i remember le guin writing about removing gods from the plot of aeneid for her lavinia, as they seem to be out of place in a novel as opposed to epic poetry, which made a lot of sense to me, but not removing *supernatural*, which did too. a balance might be struck?

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.

For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it. No. Just. Stop. Don't do that. Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back. In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.

i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?

When I was first getting into game design, it was peak Forge era and Ron Edwards' GNS theory was king. Most folks I knew used it as a triple-axis map of a ruleset or player's priorities rather than a fixed set of three possible game types.

Obviously that schema fell out of favour, but the recent return to challenge game/story game categorisation makes me wonder why a binary slider is a more useful tool of analysis than a trinary spectrum like RBG/HSL for colors.

Since you're the closest thing to my dash's resident RPG philosopher, would you mind weighing in? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Please & thank you :)

I don't think challenge/story game is necessarily a useful binary either because even most "story" games will end up engaging primarily with the language of challenge (due to the outsized influence of D&D, a game primarily concerned with challenge) even though they don't realize it. This is something I have touched upon multiple times in the past: most PbtA games tend to cast the player characters as a Group of Heroes whose aim is to Overcome Adversity even though that type of framing is nowhere in the text of Apocalypse World and in fact Apocalypse World is not a good game at all for adventure gaming. A lot of people who think they are making "story-focused" games, whatever that means, still end up making various iterations of D&D.

Like, I don't think we should think about games through a binary slider of story vs. challenge and if that's the impression you've gotten then that might be due to lack of clarity on my part. When I speak of challenge games I primarily speak of a mode of play that largely concerns itself with players putting their characters in adversity and seeking to overcome that adversity, often via knowing how to manipulate the rules and developing system mastery. It's not necessarily indicative of design philosophy.

Like, for example: Daggerheart is, at the end of the day, a challenge game. It might also be a "story" game. Whatever, but it's undoubtedly still very much a challenge or adventure game. The point isn't to create a false binary of story vs. challenge, but to illustrate a blind spot most TTRPG designers have: that TTRPGs tend to be largely about overcoming challenge even when designers think they are bucking the trend.

And there's nothing wrong with games about challenge and I am their fiercest defender! But the reason I draw attention to this is that a different way is possible and many people often end up just making D&Ds (which isn't bad: but the issue is that they end up making D&Ds when they think they're making an anti-D&D).

the-gamling-dog

ohhh that's a really cool point about primordial mechanical assumptions. Without wanting to sound like an MFA, how do you produce story without external challenges for characters to overcome? Or would you define a more story-focussed game as being one where the players get in their own way on purpose?

So, I would class Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts as games that very much work, as written, without external challenges, because these games don't assume cooperation on the player characters' part and in fact do heavily incentivize characters acting at cross purposes to each other. Something like Fiasco is an even more pronounced example because the game doesn't use traditional fortune mechanics to determine success and failure and is, in fact, very much about "playing to lose."

A challenge game is basically a structure built around one player presenting the rest of the group a situation or obstacle course that their characters need to overcome and often relies on an implicit or explicit agreement that the player characters form a coherent unit. Once you remove the idea of a coherent player character unit gameplay often becomes less of an obstacle course and more like a free-for-all.

imma push back on this reading of aw. it is very explicitly written as being about challenges to the pc as a group. the game assumes they are allies at the start and that they face some range of threats that are gonna fuck with them all regardless of their individual goals. it also assumes they share resources and like, a home base, usually. the inter-PC conflict is, of course, encouraged, but it's situated inside that general shared situation threatened by external forces. the way it differs from the "challenge" games is that it doesn't care to make players work for their success, and in fact makes it about interesting choices of "what will you do for success". e.g., all the characters are generally good at violence, and the violence related moves are always degrees of success, unlike some others; social influence always stems from lies, manipulation, seduction, bribery or threats of violence -- there's no way to get somebody to work with you by being nice; etc. the players are then choosing not the most strategically salient thing to do, which always means just doing all the fucked up things you are the best at, but whether you leverage the resources you have to do what your character wants to be done, and how it goes from there. that's the difference

From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.

okay alright. can you elaborate just a bit? particularly on how specific you are about the meaning of "myth", as it throws me off

balaclava-trismegistus

we believe both you and your blog to be acceptable.

for what, exactly?

based on the other one, for penis cutting maybe

allowing filthy frank to rebrand as a sadboy indie musician was the worst thing we as a society have ever done

donkyetra-deactivated20220511

yall being filthy frank was giving him fucking seizures holy shit

? Ok

boy-and-girl-crazy123456

I love the implication that he was trapped in some sort of filthy frank curse that could only be broken by making sad bart edit music

Ok time for me to go into nerd mode:

Joji/Filthy Frank had a gag where one of his characters would either have fake seizures i think? That and the overalls high energy that the overall act demanded basically triggered stress induced seizures. Also the voice of Filthy Frank was literally damaging his vocal cords so it was lowkey killing him. Like if he continued he’d actually be taking years off his life.

Like if Joji didn’t go into music he’d be in the hospital and or dead. I’m not even joking.

okay but like you get that he was like doing racist sketch comedies right like he was doing slit eye exaggerated asian accent stuff like the problem isn't that he's not making filthy frank content anymore it's that he was allowed to rebrand at all.

he's wasian. yeah the content sucked but i feel like you get to make racialized humour without getting cancelled for it if you are racialized yourself.

lmao get real

what kinda way to conduct a conversation this is?

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