The Gaming Outpost

  In this column, we’re going to strip our role playing games completely naked, and then (if that image doesn’t bother you) flay the skin off them, so we can get to the bones, and see what is really happening in our games.

  If you’re still with me, that will be the worst of the imagery in this article; but this article is in a very basic sense about imagery, because it’s about what we do when we play a role playing game, beneath the mechanics, beyond the roles played, apart from the descriptions.  Further, it is about how we do that.

  It is also an article in which I’m going to include a few words that might be called jargon, terms that have risen to the forefront in some circles in which role playing theory is discussed and so have been given very particular meaning, because, as with all jargon, having a narrowly defined meaning for a term makes it considerably more useful in explaining things.  The words I’m going to use are credibility, authority, and system; watch for them.

  In the prototypical role playing game, a group of people sit down at a table, with papers and dice and maybe miniatures and maps, and start talking about what their characters are doing and what happens because of this.  That prototype has branched into many variant forms.  Many people eliminated the table, the maps, the miniatures, even the dice, and rarely even the papers, and still are playing role playing games.  Live Action Role Play has put the players in motion in the roles of their characters.  Multi-User Dungeons and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations have moved the interactions of the players to the computer.  Play By Mail, Play By E-Mail, and Play By Post (known around here as Forum Games, of which we’re rather fond) change the time factors significantly, and yet still remain role playing.  What is it that ties all these together?  What are we doing when we play?

  We are creating a shared imaginary space.  Each of us contributes to that space by making statements which we are permitted to make, such as describing a setting element or stating what our characters are going to do.  As we make those statements, they get processed by something called the system, and wind up in the shared imaginary space–that is, there is a way we determine what statements are true, and when that has been determined we all imagine the same thing (or close enough, as we probably are not all imagining exactly the same thing).  At its essence, a role playing game is about creating this shared imaginary space; this may be the one thing that distinguishes it from all other forms of art, play, or entertainment.

  How are we doing it?  Well, you might say that we’re following the rules in the book; but that’s not entirely true.  Quite a bit of what we are putting into our space has nothing to do with rules in the book.  It has rather to do with that system, the real rules, the social mechanisms which control our interaction as players (of whom the referee is one) in the process of deciding collectively what is there.  Some of that is not in the book, and in fact could not be in the book.  Some of what is in the book we’re not using, in all likelihood.  Yet we have a system, and the system is related to the book, but also to us.

  One of the critical things that the system does is tell us who has the right to define what is happening in that shared imaginary space, and to what degree.  For example, in most traditional games, the referee gets to say how many orcs are in the room, and whether the lights are on or off.  A player who said how many orcs were in the room wouldn’t make any difference at all, unless he was basing that statement on other facts that had already been determined.  For example, the referee could say that there were four orcs in the room, and the player could say his character is going to throw one of them out the window, and then he could roll the dice, recognize it as a success, and then declare that because he successfully threw one of the orcs out the window there now are only three in the room.  All of that has to do with credibility.  Credibility means, who has the right to say what is happening in the shared imaginary space, and to what degree?

  What the system does is apportion credibility; that is, if the system is working, everyone at the table knows the degree to which he is able to define what is happening in the shared imaginary space, and the degree to which he must accept what other individuals say is happening.  In our traditional games, the players other than the referee get to say what their characters are attempting to do–not necessarily what they are doing; in many games, those attempts do not become part of the shared imaginary space until the referee at least acquiesces to them, and there may be mechanics required to determine whether their attempts succeed.  For example, in many games, a player might say, “I hit the orc,” but he lacks the credibility to create that.  Rather, that is taken to mean, “I attempt to hit the orc” or “I want to hit the orc”.  The referee will then tell the player to roll particular dice, then will look at the result and announce whether in fact the character did or did not hit the orc.  The referee thus has the credibility to say whether those actions are successful.

  It is important to understand this for a number of reasons, but the most significant is this:  if we understand that credibility determines who gets to define what aspects of the shared imaginary space, and we further see that system apportions credibility amongst the participants in specific ways, we can change how that credibility is apportioned.

  Some guys who once played with me continued to play with another referee after I stopped running the game; they sometimes told me about their sessions.  There was one player who was, I’m afraid, a bit unusual.  He would be playing along, get in a conversation with a non-player character, and suddenly he would be doing both sides of the conversation.  “So then, he says to me, why’d you do that, anyway? And so I tells him, this was why.  Interestin’, he says.”  The players who cut their teeth on my rather more orthodox game sessions found this completely insane; referees run non-player characters, not players.  Yet the referee let this player run with his ideas, and the player never did anything inappropriate or unbalancing with it–he just created believable encounters.  He would also add details to rooms as he played (“So I pick up the book on the desk, and look at it.  It’s an interesting book, looks like a diary, but I’m not sure whether I should read it.”).

  This is system adjusting for the players; this player was taking credibility to himself, and the referee was ceding it to him.  There is nothing wrong with that as an approach to play, if the group finds it acceptable.

  There is probably a lot of confusion at this point about credibility and system, and what either of them have to do with those rule books.  There’s a fair amount of connection.  Do the rules have credibility?  Actually, they can’t, because they cannot speak into the shared imaginary space; they have to be interpreted into the shared imaginary space.  Thus the rules have authority, but not credibility.  Having authority, they are the place of appeal, like statutes and precedents in a court of law; a player, any player, can state that something must be so in the shared imaginary space because the rules state something.  However, the rules can only enter the shared imaginary space by being interpreted, and the question then becomes whose interpretation we believe.  The answer to that is that the system gives credibility in some fashion that enables us to recognize which person’s explanation of the meaning of a rule is determinative.  The rule itself means only what the credible person says it means.  That might mean that the rule means what the referee says; of course, credibility could be so established that the agreement of several players can override the credibility of the referee, or that someone at the table is recognized as having such a grasp on the rules that he can state the meaning of a rule.  Whether that statement is then part of the shared imaginary space in its effects then depends on whether the system says that book rules will be followed at all times, or there is some intervening level of credibility that enables someone to decide whether, when, and how book rules apply.  Book rules become part of the system if the person with credibility to define the rules makes them part of the system.

  At the same time, it is the system that decides who has that credibility; and that may well come from the book rules.  Although many games are terribly unclear about it, most make some attempt to apportion credibility in the pages of the rules, so that players can figure out who gets to decide what.

  So rules define system, system apportions credibility, credibility interprets the rules to define the system, and around and around and around it goes, and where does it all start anyway?

  It starts with a simple social contract.  Several people get together, and agree to play a game.  As they sit down to play, they usually agree that one person has the credibility to tell them what the rules mean, and if the game starts to work that one person lets the others know how much credibility each has.  In the end, each may have very little credibility, or the one who started with all the credibility might give it all away, but that’s how the system is created.  Through our interactions, we decide who has the credibility to say what, and so the game is born, and the shared imaginary space comes alive.

  Decades ago now I use to troubleshoot electronic audio equipment.  When I was first learning, I could only do the easy things–take tubes out to the tester and see if they’re good, look for burnt out components and broken connections.  Eventually, though, I started to understand how these machines worked.  That’s a critical step.  Once you see how something is supposed to work, when it doesn’t work, you can try to figure out why it isn’t working by looking at what it’s supposed to do in search of the failure.

  Now that we know how, at the most basic level, our roleplaying games work, we have a critical tool for figuring out why they don’t work on those occasions when things fall apart.  Knowing why they don’t work is usually the first step to fixing them (unless you just want remove each player in turn until you find the one that’s messing up your game).  Understanding what the system is, how it apportions credibility, and how credibility is used to define the shared imaginary space, is foundational to what makes games work, or not work, and how to keep them working.

  I should attach a footnote to this.  The concept of system as the means by which events in the shared imaginary space are determined is known as the Lumpley Principle, and is the insight of Vincent Baker.  Others have contributed to the concepts described here, although I certainly am one of the contributors, having made the significant distinction between authority and credibility elsewhere, and written something on credibility distribution.

  This has been close to the current cutting edge of role playing game theory; I hope I have made it both clear and practical.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.