Very · First · Steps

Precipice is doing shows this month, and Gary has student performances for 45 mins before the professionals' play. The student performances are scene-length, with some side-coaching - in addition to being a reward for class work, it's also advertising for the workshops: whoever's in the audience for the student segment gets to see something of how the classes go.

We warmed up with some exercises, mostly impulse-passing. (Make a "big" gesture - later combined with sounds - at the next person in the group, who repeats it with you and then passes it to the next person etc.) Because Gary kept coaching us to add energy, we were pretty damn loose and, dropping into sports-speak for a second, pumped by the time the "show" proper started.

My scenes:

Me and D. in, said the audience, a laundromat. Our job: to notice something about the other and react to it emotionally, using few words as late in the process as possible. In the first version of the scene, I noticed that D. had decided to wash the pants he'd worn into the laundromat. "Is that a problem??" he wanted to know. The scene ended when I noticed he'd decided to wash his underwear too . . . In the second take, D. noticed that I had an ear-hair. This gave me a chance to be embarrassed and annoyed with him and him a chance to wonder why I was so worked up about it.

K., P. and I in, said the audience person, "a retirement home for clowns." (Gary: "Can you be more specific?") This was an "each of you begin the scene by noticing something about an object and reacting to it emotionally" scene. The procedure is, once one person has a strong reaction, the partner(s) react to that person. The verboten thing in these scenes is mere curiosity. Even though you may not know what the object is or why it's such a big deal, your character does, so you act that way. In this case, I put myself in a wheelchair (just a chair-chair in real life of course) and "noticed" that my parking brake was busted, but K. took focus when she noticed that her clown nose didn't squeak any more and began to cry. P. offered K. her own clown nose, which I think we can all agree was a very sweet thing to do. The scene ended when the consoled and now quite giddy K. jumped into my lap in the wheelchair and, as K. and I hugged for joy, I gestured to P. to hop on too. It was all keyed by K. going with the spontaneous impulse, but what we ended up with was a small vehicle containing an absurd number of clowns. Without even trying!

Then we repeated a two-person scene exercise from this week's class: one person sits on the couch, discovers something about an object and has a strong emotional reaction. The second person enters the room with (pantomimed) shopping bags. The first person says something about their reaction to the returning shopper. The shopper MUST cross the room, set the bags down and say, "I got the groceries" as his first action and dialog. On Tuesday, and most of tonight, we perpetuated a very, um, gendered structure to this couch-sitting and grocery-bringing business: it was pretty much always the guy on the couch and the woman lugging home the shopping. So S. and I broke the pattern. She sat on the couch and discovered that we had the winning lottery ticket. I tossed the groceries on the counter and shared enthusiasm. There was hugging and jumping.

There were other great scenes not involving me. Naturally, I'm not going to tell you about them.

The entire evening was a blast, and was as much fun as I remember doing theater to be. I was happy with my energy level and my general range of motion - including what we call "changing level" (sitting, standing, flopping etc.). I think I can do a better job sometimes of really keying directly on my partner's moment-to-moment modulations.

My classmates were impressive as heck! The ones I worked with made performing easy. The others were a huge pleasure to watch.

We've got a concept called Impact, which is the character-score component that drives resolution. Think of the AP score in DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes, or the attribute/skill scores that you roll against in Pendragon, or an Action/Ability score in the Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game. In Nobilis, Impact would be your attribute score PLUS any miracle points you chose to spend on that specific action. It's what the player decides the character is bringing to the table. In this cosmic-level supers game, Impact would come from an attribute or power score.

We've got a concept called Adjustments. Adjustments are just positive or negative modifiers, from situational effects, from objects of power, taking time to aim, that kind of thing. In MURPG, for instance, you can get a situational modifier of one stone for taking a flashback panel. In a One-Roll-Engine game, you can get an extra die for taking a round to aim. These are Adjustments. Miracle Points in Nobilis aren't adjustments because they're an internal resource under the player/character's control.

So Impact PLUS Adjustments EQUALS Effect.

As a design matter, we need to determine the top of the scale. To do that, figure the maximum Impact you're going to let a character have - we're talking Trigon here; Galactus - and the maximum number of Adjustments anyone could conceive of earning for any one action the resolution system would resolve.

Maximum Impact PLUS Maximum Adjustments EQUALS Universal Effect. The whole universe. Every living being in the cosmos. All the stars in the sky. That kind of thing. Scale down from there.

So if we decide that 10 is the maximum Impact, then any effect above 10 requires adjustments to become possible. If the biggest Adjustment score anyone could conceivably earn is 8, then an Effect of 18 is Universal. Scale down to some minor inconvenience, like a poke in the eye, at 1.

Thinking about a few famous "cosmic" story arcs, I infer the following principles. Tell me what you think:

1. The action in a cosmic-level supers story is the Quest for Adjustments to attain Universal Effect.
* Thanos wants to kill everything in the universe to win the love of Death
* Darkseid wants perfect obedience from everyone in Existence
* The Anti-Monitor wants to breach the moment of Creation
* Metron wants to get behind the Source
* Loki wants to bring about Ragnarok

2. There is no escaping McGuffins! (I mean, in constructing a Quest.)
* The Anti-Life Equation (New Gods)
* The Cosmic Cube (Captain Marvel vs. Thanos)
* Flash's treadmill (Crisis on Infinite Earths)
* The Mobius Chair (New Gods)
* The Babel Spire (Annhilation: Conquest)
* Even Galactus has to assemble an elaborate machine just to eat a planet (The Galactus Trilogy)

This is a good thing for Our Heroes. Darkseid and Thanos and Loki are tough dudes, but they're not unimaginably tough without McGuffins. So Captain Marvel and Superman and even the likes of Iron Man can hang with them for a time.

3. The cosmic superhero story is about bubbles. A powerful villain over-invests in the McGuffin quest, just as financial sectors over-invest in a segment of the economy. The villain's power inflates, but simultaneously destabilizes. The role of the hero is to pop the bubble at the moment when doing so will leave the villain profoundly weaker than before he started.

-----------

So, imagine that one attribute is called Aegis. It's your tendency not to be obliterated by massive fluxes of cosmic power. Imagine that villains start out with very high Aegis scores; heroes have enough Aegis that the villain doesn't trivially disintegrate or mind-control them. Even Rick Jones has some. But villains can trade Aegis toward progress toward the McGuffin. Meanwhile heroes can gain Aegis through the equivalent of side quests. (Think of Captain Marvel gaining Cosmic Awareness.)

brand_of_amber

ewilen

fang_langford

The poet Henry Taylor said, at least once, that what makes poetry poetry is that you remember the wording exactly, or if you don't, it bothers you. That is, poetry is what you don't want to paraphrase.

So, relating to Lee Crowe's second point, it might be that RPGs are games where the rules let you attempt anything the avatar you control "should" be able to do within the fiction, or else you get anxious. (Or annoyed.)

So, Fang made a great point about the decidedly un-"esthetic" play of most D&D groups. BUT, think back to the OD&D era. The lack of rules for non-lethal combat - punching and grappling and such - bothered people. Because "we" felt that we should be able to do that. Something was missing. And then we got (admittedly problematic) unarmed-combat rules in the AD&D DMG and it was a relief. (It also caused a bunch of problems, especially because at low levels AD&D unarmed-combat had a much lower whiff factor than melee did, so you were incented to wrestle all the time.)

This is not the same thing as Lee Crowe's suggestion [see Elliot's post at the link] that in RPGs the rules are "a mere guide." Once you put in unarmed-combat rules, they might well be The Rules. But you've relieved anxiety about "I should be able to do that."

Since I wrote the above I remembered how upset people were when the Serenity RPG didn't include ship-construction rules.

After that came the scenes: another, last cut (for this session) at the reaction-scene concept we've been playing with for weeks. Three people in a setting chosen by the audience (my trio got a library), open with each character holding a pantomimed object, each character makes discoveries about the object until someone has a strong enough emotional reaction to draw the attention of the other characters; then the other characters react to the first character - not the object - and from there a chain of emotional reactions should ensue. Dialog to be used sparingly.

In the moments when it was working right, to Gary's satisfaction and ours, the experience of paying intense attention to your fellow actor and reacting "honestly" (in Gary's words) to them was, and here we arrive at last at my point! . . .

Immersive.

Which, a couple weeks after I foreswore trying to draw obvious connections between my improv class and my RPG hobby, is what got me thinking. Ever since gamers began discussing the ontogony of immersion in the classic rgfa threads by Kuhner and Rempt et al, discussion has tended to focus on the interiority of it. But I wonder if there's a whole other side to it that merits discussion, specifically the role of the immersive player's fellow gamers in the experience. To what extent is character-immersion in RPGs a phenomenon of immediate reaction to what fellow players, including the GM, are doing and saying? Can we take our understanding of immersion further by foregrounding the group component?

I think I've written in the past that, while immersion interests me a lot, I am at best fitfully immersive. Most of the time, I want to learn from the more immersive, and make sure they have the space to talk about it. This is one of those times. When I think of my most immersive moments in tabletop games, it may be fair to characterize them as arising from an immediacy of interaction with fellow players, but it may also be fair to say I've got the makings of a theory and I'm trying to cram my experience into it.

Thoughts?

After that we had two full scenes by the students who had taken the class before. This was more, everyone make discoveries about an object until someone has a strong reaction, then react to the reactor's emotions. The audience set the first scene in an air-traffic control tower and the second on a bridge. In the first scene, Gary strongly coached the actors to not rush to solve the problem, which was that Sheila's character noticed that an airplane was, you know, missing. Also to keep moving and not be so quick to talk. So we ended up with a genuinely hilarious scene of the controllers cheering each other up and validating each other's feelings. Seriously, it was great. In the second scene, about a family on a bridge, Gary encouraged much more dialog, including much more that added to backstory. The scene also developed with a lot less movement than the first one.

I personally found the second much less engaging, which made me think, "I see what Gary's driving at with this 'stay in the moment' stuff." He himself didn't make this argument afterward, though, so I'll continue to mull.

DC Heroes is officially over as Bill's babies are now borned. He has other things to think about than gaming.

And I ran In a Wicked Age at today's monthly meetup. It was kind of a last minute thing, and I encouraged everyone to approach it in a "Well, let's see what we have here!" spirit. I had four players, including one from last month's Don't Rest Your Head session, another guy I hadn't played with before, and a couple (husband and wife, I think) who had not been to any of the meetups before. The players picked the Unquiet Dead oracle, which gave us various scholars and bodyguards and necromancers around a ruin with a malevolent spirit shut up in the basement. Plus a castle groundskeeper with a magic hammer guarding the basement prison. Plus a talking bird who wanted the ring shut in with the spirit and the vengeful woman whose hair the bird had stolen to make her nest.

It was a shakeout cruise kind of session as we got ourselves used to the rules and procedures. I didn't get them completely right, as I did some things in classic "Forgey-Games" fashion that don't work that way in IAWA. In particular, I think I engaged in some subconscious stakes-setting even knowing that I shouldn't. I did enjoy several of the PCs, though, and we made sure to wrap up in time to experience setup for the next chapter. That part of the game seems to work nicely. K's player Brinn sort of got robbed, I think, of really shining in Chapter One because of the situation setup, but she was on the top of the Owe list for Chapter 2, with a couple more appearances down-line. And the Necromancer with the Heart of Gold (sort of) "won" the chapter, successfully driving everyone else away from the ruins. Since he was a PC, I didn't have that guilty feeling I sometimes get when NPCs come out on top.

chadu

Meanwhile, while my relationship to the Dresden Files book series as a whole can be described as "vexed" - I just read the most recent paperback, White Night, and wholly enjoyed it. Either my Stockholm Syndrome has intensified to Patty Hearst levels, or the books have continued to improve, or both.

Broadly conceive actual play of the ADRPG or a successor game as a series of status transactions. PCs and NPCs are relatively better or worse at each of the four attributes, their understanding of lore (Powers in ADRPG), Karma/Stuff, political and social connectedness etc.

At the end of a session, the GM can award up to one experience point to each player.

Each player may also award up to one experience point to each other player. The basis for this award is, "Player X honored my character's status." When awarding the point, the awarding player must explain HOW the awarded player did so.

This can mean fairly fierce opposition within the fiction. Consider Corwin escapes Benedict on the Black Road. Corwin wins, yay! But in the course of doing so, every action "his player" undertakes honors Benedict's status as Warfare Primary. More quietly, every time someone is nervously deferential to Brand after he gets "rescued," they honor Brand's status as Psyche Monster. And so on.

What I THINK this does:

1. Encourage PLAYERS to honor the character conceptions of other PCs.

2. Encourage players to request scenes together. It's possible for someone to honor your status without appearing in a scene with you, but it's a lot harder.

IOW, in theory, you get more mutual respect and less iso- play.

Weaknesses I see:

a. Very hard to award a point to someone who is higher-status than you. Frex, if you're Rank-2 Warfare and I'm Rank-3, it's pretty easy for me to win a point from you for status honoring, but how do you win one from me? POSSIBLE NON-PROBLEMHOOD: There's probably SOMETHING at which I am better than you that isn't Warfare. You can honor it. We now have a scene in which each of us is playing to the strengths of the other.

b. Great scenes happen when status changes! Doesn't this tend to ossify what should be supple? POSSIBLE NON-PROBLEMHOOD: I don't know!

c. Does not assure that the GM plays in a way that honors the PCs' status. Since the original Wuj text tends to foster GM disrespect of player-characters in practice, this seems like a hole. POSSIBLE NON-PROBLEMHOOD: Respect is contagious! POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Just suppose that at the end of each session, each player can award the GM an experience point on the same basis: honoring status. And the GM uses these karmically as temporary Stuff to foist adversity on the players. POSSIBLE PROBLEM: Then the players can avoid awarding points, drying up the GM's adversity capacity? Hm.

Thoughts? Improvements?

About improv, it's become important to take it for itself, and not try to relate it immediately to RPGs. The things about Improv I've imagined would most apply to tabletop gaming - status work, building narrative material on the fly - are things Gary is either not stressing or is teaching us to actively avoid, for now. "Don't playwright it" is a recurring injunction, meaning, avoid building plot or creating explanatory material.

Instead he's teaching us to react at an emotional level, and through movement before dialog. In Tuesday's main scenework exercise, for instance, we could speak, but only subsequent to taking physical action. In earlier exercises, the only words we could use amounted to captions. Frex, miming the use of a swing set, I could shout "Swinging!" but that was it.

It's tremendously good discipline. But in addition to not being obviously applicable to tabletop RP, I get the sense that trying to relate it overmuch to tabletop RP will just make it harder for me to develop the skills he's teaching us.

We had to miss this week's DC Heroes session because of family obligations. Week before last, we met, and Zeno Tyrrell and Jacob Kine figured out why the superheroes of Earth all departed the planet en masse shortly before the campaign began. Simply: Doctor Sivana used the Anti-Life Equation to tell them to leave. Now that Zeno and Kine have broken Doctor Sivana's power, they were able to call the heroes home. This involved breaking in to Justice League HQ on the moon.

We also reached a campaign crossroads. We had to decide whether we'll pass our remaining campaign time on Earth trying to restore the Good-Evil balance that Sivana upset by sending the superheroes away, or on Apokalips, essentially, greening it. (The campaign is planned to be of temporary duration.) I plumped for Apokalips on the theory that if you're playing a New Gods campaign, you should by golly have a grand ambition. Making Apokalips a nice place seems to count as "grand." Mark, player of Zeno,  agreed.

When I'm not tired, I should talk about lumpley's interesting post on "Rules vs. Vigorous Creative Agreement." I like it. It makes me think a key question in gaming is, "What are you willing to treat as having external authority?" For instance, some people treat the formal system (game mechanics in a rules text) as being an independent thing which they obey. Others treat the game world itself, and/or its constituent characters, as authoritative, as being "real" in a way that commands deference. And contrariwise. If you come down to it, the game rules matter only so long as we agree to use them and the game world "exists" only so long as we pretend it does. But it is different kinds of useful to conduct ourselves as if one or the other must be heeded. And you can get different kinds of fun or unfun gaming out of either approach. (And of course, some gamers - most? - combine the approaches too, treating the fiction and the mechanics as being external to the social arrangements of the play group. These are the gamers who regard mechanics as properly "translating the physics of the game world" and suchlike.)

NB: I don't want to leave even a moment's impression that I think Vincent imagines that the rules have some authority his groups haven't decided to give them for reasons of their own (Vincent's a smart guy), just as the guy who has filled five notebooks with details of the flora of his World of Lyrismica since 1983 recognizes that he and his players have made the whole thing up. But I'm pretty sure (classic) game theory speaks to why it's productive for Vincent's groups to commit themselves in advance to respecting outputs of a chosen mechanical system. As for RPG characters and game worlds, of course they're "real," because human imagination is real, and the products of creativity demand respect.

Okay, so I wrote about it tired. But I had more to say about committing to mechanics as a way to commit yourself to unwanted but creatively valid outcomes (is "tragedy" a good enough word for this, Vincent?) that I just can't tease out in my present state. I should also deal with why I think comment 16 on Vincent's site is off-target too.

Some of you aren't Paul, but are a hell of a lot more expert on the subject than I. Please feel free to weigh in.

ptevis

Hell, some people enjoy playing PTA; to me it's just nerve-wracking.

He wrote:

Actually, could I get you unpack this a bit more? To me, Primetime Adventures is one of the most improv-like of the Story Games pack. (This may be because while I was running it I was also doing a ton of improv workshops and was stealing techniques left and right to toss into the game.)

Herewith the unpacking!

1. We loved preparing our series. Just loved it! For reals.
2. We scheduled a pilot and all showed up.
3. We framed our scenes by the book, and tried to play briskly toward conflict, per the book and the surround, esp the Forge publisher and actual-play fora.
4. We were very careful to set stakes where "something interesting happens either way" - e.g. if I successfully sneak into the mansion, I'm in, but if I fail, I'm captured and still in, just under their power.
5. We deployed the conflict system by the rules to determine success and narration rights.
6. We made sure to give everyone their say in advance of the narration, while respecting the narrator's prerogatives.
7. At the beginning of Session Two, we resolved to finish the pilot that evening, particularly by eschewing cautious, "dithering" play.
8. And we did it! We finished the episode in two three-hour sessions, after what was, within the fiction, a frenetic climax of last-minute rescue, utilitarian murder, character-defining resentment and spectacle.

Then we cancelled the series and the system. We took a certain amount of pride in avoiding the Abilene Paradox.

What didn't work for us: My friend Mark put it really well, at the moment when he was trying to sound as positive as possible in case the rest of us liked it.

"It's an awful lot of . . . prep."

IOW, it didn't feel like roleplaying as we enjoyed it. Instead it was:

Lots of OOC discussion around series and character concept.

Lots of OOC discussion about scene framing, including THE PURPOSE OF THE SCENE. (This is right in the rules, as I remember them: establish the purpose of the scene before you start it.)

A few minutes "roleplaying" in the sense of IC conversation and iterative action - literally, a few minutes - mindful that THE POINT is to get to the conflict, because that's the purpose of the scene.

Set stakes. Drop back out to OOC discussion to make sure the stakes are: understood by everybody; lead to the desired interesting outcome either way; offers an opportunity for everyone to support either side; completely clear as to the meaning of victory.

Play through the conflict resolution system with the cards and trade-ins of fan mail for cards.

Lots of OOC discussion about how the narrator might choose to continue the outcome, until everyone has their say.

Narrator makes his decision (we were all men), and describes the continuation, which usually involved restating a fair amount of what had been thrown out in the post-conflict kibitz period. Somewhere in here, someone bothers to say a line or two of IC dialogue.

New scene! Has some OOC discussion about scene-framing etc.

We were exhausted! Part of it was the rhythm issue that the_tall_man wrote about yesterday. Part of it was, the experience was probably a lot like having a story conference among television writers. (My friend Bill said, "But you know, they pay people to do that.") It felt herky-jerky, and by the time we'd productively resolved everything we found no scope for surprise. It was like everything was played out before we played it.

Fanmail totally failed for us. When we were actually into what someone else was doing, we weren't concentrating on fanmail. When we were emotionally distant enough from the action we perforce weren't inclined to award it. So the economy of the resolution system faced a liquidity crisis akin to current US financial-market woes. The resolution system felt like a chore. The cards plus fan-mail plus support decisions felt both colorless and too much work for the output. (It's deliberately unmoored from fictional action and it stops "play" - what our group thinks of as play - dead while you work through it.)

All of that stuff above is FUN for some people. I see references to game-session podcasts where the participants get their biggest enjoyment out of precisely that "writer's conference" stuff, the meta discussion about where the story could go and what the "stakes" ought to be etc. What Mark called "prep" IS PLAY to them. More power to them! PTA was us discovering that we're not like that.

Had we known anything whatsoever of improv techniques back then, we might have made a go of it. What we did know of - this was early 2006 - was that the semi-official doctrine of the Forge diaspora was play the games as written and great things will happen. Set stakes; don't dither; embrace the framing and the kibitzing and the mutual "support." Don't treat every new rule set as a mere supplement to the ur-game you've been playing since you took up the hobby. I will probably insist that, bad as PTA was for us, we did in fact play the game by the rules, and as Matt Wilson was urging people to play it in various fora.

I'd add an esthetic objection: If you follow the 2006-era advice about framing conflicts, your play risks being what real screenwriters call "on-the-nose" - too directly and explicitly about what it's about. e.g. "If your protagonist's Issue is Anger, then the stakes of her conflict should be 'Does she give in to her Anger?' " This is exactly the trap DITV's conflict system avoids falling into, to pick just one game. The PTA Way thus seems very UN-improvlike to me. Again, as the game is written. The series-preparation and character creation are so great you could probably slide a new play procedure and resolution system in place of the existing one and have a game even I would like.

Now I gotta say three nice things about games before I bitch again, don't I?

You can also declare an immersion conflict against another player, to get them to immerse. Make sure to achieve complete clarity as to stakes before proceeding further. In this case, roll your Empathy plus Push dice against your opponent's Buzzkill and Pull resistance. Other players may contribute for or against as above, reversing the die types. If you win, your opponent immerses. If you lose, your opponent can't initiate or participate in immersion conflicts for the remainder of the session. Once again, high die wins narration rights.

Note: The above two methods are the only ways players can immerse in this game.

Clarification: Narration rights are distinct from victory. If the immersion conflict results in your immersion, the narrator must describe you as immersed, even if the narrator was your opponent in the conflict. If you lose the conflict, you aren't immersed, so even if you win narration rights you must acknowledge your failure.

Clarifying Note: Immersion conflicts can't use the "teamup" provisions of the base conflict rules. Immersion is inherently selfish.

Strategy Note: If there's someone you want to keep from immersing, launch an immersion conflict you think you'll lose against them early. So long as everyone follows the rules faithfully, you're creating an exciting conflict over a major goal of your opponent, guaranteeing enjoyable play.

1.0 Chargen.
1.1 Get all the players together, in a circle. (There IS a GM, who sits outside it, or in the middle, whatever.)

1.2 Turn to the player on your left and say, "The thing I admire about you is . . . "

1.2.1 Everyone does the like in turn.

1.3 Turn to the player on your right and say, "The thing I hate about you is . . . "

1.3.1 Everyone does the like in turn.

1.4 Turn to the player most nearly opposite you and say, "The thing I fear about you is . . . "

1.4.1 Everyone does the like in turn.

1.5 Turn BACK to the player on your right and say, "The thing I LOVE about you is . . . "

1.5.1 Everyone does the like in turn.

2.0 GO PLAY.

Ten Things I FATE About You I.

Chargen

1. Pick a genre.
2. Announce your character's name and archetype. (e.g. I'm Citizen Simian, Philosopher Gorilla. BUT THIS MIGHT BE TOO MUCH!)
3. Say things about each other according to some procedure I haven't bothered to devise. These become your PC's Aspects.
4. Stop when you get to 10 Aspects apiece.
5. GO PLAY.

immlass

mcroft

mcroft

follybard

For "post-Amber Amber," I'm mulling a chargen system that is endowment-based. I should note that vaxalon's LARPish Amber rules have an element of this.

For anybody: The Improv Encyclopedia as a whole. I just discovered it via Google and I'm a tyro anyway, so this isn't a recommendation (or disrec), just a "Oh! I found something!"

I thought about that incident when I took dherblay's advice and read the "Agreement" chapter of Halpern and Close's Truth in Comedy today at Borders. The authors argue that what they call "agreement" is almost always funnier and more satisfying to an audience than disagreement, particularly in improvised scenes. As examples they recount two Second City-era improvised sketches of a woman and her apartment burglar and a cop and the crook he's chasing cooperating with each other. They caution that in a scripted play, the writer can make sure disagreement furthers the plot, but in improv, it usually either merely delays or blows up the scene entirely.

All of this is, I'm afraid, a long way of getting to a Forge/Story-Games critique. Sorry! But here goes.

An archetypal "indie" declaration runs like this: When I hear people say, "We had a great session - we didn't roll dice the entire time!" I think, "That's terrible! The system they're using isn't supporting their play. They need mechanics that will help them ___________." (And oh by the way, my friends or I will sell them those mechanics.)

The archetypal speaker here always seemed obviously wrong to me, but it took Halpern and Close to help me say why. The speaker hears "We had a great session - we [didn't use the game's mechanical systems]" and thinks, "They've been brainwashed into thinking that roleplaying is only 'serious' when you don't use the rules." I think Halpern and Close would hear, "We spent an entire evening in vigorous creative agreement."

And that is powerfully pleasurable. Mechanical systems, especially fortune-based systems, can be effective ways of arbitrating disagreements about outcomes. They can provide a useful oracular function too: Not sure where we want the action to go from here? Consult the fortune deck or random encounter table. But at least some people are going to find all that less satisfying than an evening spent in vigorous creative agreement with their friends.

This is surely not the only pleasure worth having from a roleplaying game, or one that will satisfy all of the people all of the time. But you have to be practically autistic to see it as nothing but a pale substitute for mechanically arbitrating disagreement.

Strawmen I probably need to burn in advance: Not every diceless, mechanicless RP session ever has been a blast for all participants. Some people have had bad times during such evenings. But those people wouldn't be prefacing their recap with "It was a great session . . . " And sometimes, yes, the agreement gets bought at the price of timorous play, the tacit or explicit understanding that "We will not expose any of our characters to genuine risk of any kind." For some people, that's still enjoyable play. But for those who find it frustrating, story-game-type techniques as developed and promulgated through the Forge and associated institutions during the middle years of this decade may be a useful kickstart. (My heresy is to wonder if mechanically obtrusive, conflict-oriented, stakes-setting games of contested narration rights might be most useful as training exercises toward better freeform play. Hah! Take that, Luke Crane!) Some Forge/Story-Game designers and consumers appear to have been the people in the examples above - they got bored on those diceless evenings or got frustrated by mild aimlessness. (I'm going by their own accounts here, particularly those of Tony Lower-Basch.) But some of those people appear to have confused themselves with everybody.

There's no guarantee that mid-decade "Story-game" procedures - hasten conflict; embrace and even foster inter-player disagreement; resolve that disagreement mechanically - will produce esthetically superior transcripts or more fun for the participants. It's just a thing some people like to do more than they like the thing other people like. I remember a quasi-manifesto in favor of  the "hard," competitive approach a couple years ago that went, more or less, I'll set my stakes and my buddy will fight me hard for them and if I lose that's okay because his idea is even better! The argument is pretty straightforwardly esthetic. My reaction was, "If you think your buddy's idea is so much better than your own, why not just use it in the first place?" The obvious answer appears to be, because I like the contest for its own sake. Which is cool and all, but some people don't. Vigorous agreement suits them fine.