Talking to people on Mastodon…
@frotz posted a link to a nice blog post about realism in elfgames.
Common law is a type of law that arises not out of royal edicts or legislative drafting but from prior rulings on particular cases. … The idea is that judges (but we might call them referees instead) make rulings based on each situation as it presents itself but will consider past rulings in coming to their decision. – The Secret to Realism in Games
The Secret to Realism in Games
@ghost_bird noted that this seemed authoritarian to her and not at all a collaborative process, and that’s true. The question is: what do we do about it?
I agree that if we use the language of judges and laws, it comes across as authoritarian; but we could also use the language of oral history to explain what we are seeing. We are a group of people with our play culture, and this play culture is encoded in the stories of our common past that we tell each other, about our past adventures, our past campaigns, and thus a body of explanations emerges: this is how we want the game to be played.
In any case, I presume that negotiations at the table are implied. At least they are at my table.
So what happens is a short negotiation. When I say “the players object and I relent” then this is what is happening at the table: I propose how this is going to fall out and there’s a little moment of silence where players can interject or propose a different ruling until we’re all as happy as can be, and play proceeds. – 2017-04-27 Rulings
Whether the game uses one central world-authority and multiple single-character players or not is independent of who develops the set of rules we use for play.
Certainly, narrative control in the games I like to play is strongly constrained: players only really get in-game control over their characters, maybe over their henchmen, and everything else is either the referee in-game, or a discussion at the table between all involved, out-of-game. Thus collective rule development happens out-of-game.
The games I am in are full of these discussions: does hiding behind a corner grant cover from an exploding fireball? This question alone must have led to 40 messages on our campaign chat in the last few days...
Personally, though, I usually dislike these discussions and hardly ever participate. I’m the kind of person who (as a player) feels more immersed if the environment is explicitly not open for negotiation; that is, I don’t want to discuss whether the bandits can hear us, whether the flaming skulls would have known where we are, whether the vampire would have thought to scry on us. Without negotiation, it feels “more real” and my in-game decisions carry more weight.
Similarly, as a player I don’t want to help develop in world-building except in the most flimsy of situations. If one player plays a wood elf from the Red Acorn forest, and they love to hunt with their bows and to swim in the river, and I have no idea about the Red Acorn forest, I might take the actions of that player as inspiration – but I’d never approach a player and ask them: do you want to develop the Red Acorn forest? Unless I’d then get to be a player on an adventure in said forest, run by the other other player. In which case we are sharing referee duties and that’s fine.
If I get to explore the areas that I helped design, the world is full of spoilers. It’s less exciting, less “real”. Similarly, I don’t want to explore an area that the referee is rolling up behind the screen as we go. That’s not how the imagined world gains “weight”.
I guess that’s why I like the asymmetry of of the roles at the table: referee and players. I like the asymmetry from both sides of the screen.
Related:
I never ask them where monsters are going or what the backstory of the current location is. – Transparency at the table
#RPG #Old School