Brian Rogers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
subplotkudzu) wrote2008-04-10 01:24 pm
subplotkudzu) wrote2008-04-10 01:24 pm
Entry tags:
Cause Based Powers
Something that came up in another thread that I wanted to yank out and discuss separately. It's both long and technical so it goes
behind the cut.
Bothmylescorcoranand notthebuddhaused the term "Effects based" to define systems like GURPS and CHAMPIONS, where powers are defined entirely by what they do, not how they do it. My 10d6 laser beam is mechanically identical to your 10d6 lightning bolt. From a game mechanics perspective it's a reasonable enough way to handle powers.
However, both then contrasted it to Narrative Based. Now, I don't see Effect being contrasted by Narrative - I see Effect as contrasted by Cause. In a Cause Based system, which is where I’d put Villains & Vigilantes, my 2d8 laser beam is substantially different than your 2d8 Lightning Bolt. It generates different outcomes, is more or less effective against different defenses, because the Cause - light vs. lightning - is just as important than the mechanical Effect of delivering 2d8 damage.
In most cases those attacks are defined as part of broader powers - Light Powers and Lightning Control - that give a variety of different effects. If I want to illuminate a room I can do it with Light Powers rather easily, radiating light of any intensity or hue; you can do it with your lightning control as well, but by making an arclight between your fingers for harsh glare and heavy shadows. I can precision melt a steel door, you can't, but you can short out a computer, or perhaps even control it. Some of these would come naturally, and there would be clear mechanics written on the character sheet; some would not, and would have to be invented during play - the system had rules for inventing as well, which were manipulated to this purpose.
To me, this is a better system, as it cuts closer to the reality of comics, and it's what I'd like to see in my supers setting construction kit. I see it as containing a certain comic book logic in the setting that the players can define. I know from experience that this definition will occur anyway in a long term, maintained world. The vagaries of dice and player choices over 20 years of the Variants universe meant that Lightning Control was nearly always tied to increased strength and agility - the lightning controllers would electrify their reflexes and galvanize their muscles. Light control was nearly always tied with heightened intelligence, as their thoughts moved at lightspeed. Flame powers carried super strength and endurance. This just fell out over time, and became an engrained part of the setting, as regular as people with flame powers being able to immolate themselves and fly. It made the Variants universe distinct from the Marvel and DC ones that it inevitably sprang from. That's what I want to present in the kit - the chance to build a distinct world that is not hindered by how useful someone else somewhere thought an energy blast would be compared to invisibility, or that everyone who can run fast can vibrate through walls. Maybe they can. And maybe invisibility is incredibly rare and useful, or common and predictable. But it's the players choice.
But the decision that light powers makes me smarter or lets me carve holes in walls isn't related to the Narrative in any way. Since by simple inference on the term Narrative, Narrative based powers means I can use my light powers in whichever way best improves the story. If that means thinking at lightspeed, I do that. If it means flying on a stream of hard photons, I do that too. I might not remember to do it next session when it wouldn't serve the narrative, but, hey, that happens in comics all the time. But I'm not interested in Narrative based powers because it's too free-form. I want mechanics on the sheet indicating how good I am with my Light Powers and what I have learned to do with it, with a broad understanding of what I won't be able to get it to do. I know the Cause, and I want the Effects to tie to that, not to be ends unto themselves or be dependent on the current story.
Mylescorcoran as said this " but it is very much in the broader sense (in the hobby) of Narrative as player-empowerment."
When did Narrative become player empowerment?
Narrativist means you're trying to craft a compelling, or at least interesting, story. Gamist means you're trying to set a enjoyable challenge within the rules. Simulationist means you're trying to accurately create a reality (even if that reality has rules totally unlike our own). In a Gamist setting I have the most player empowerment because I have, written on my character sheet, exactly what I can and can't do, and the GM is obliged to give me a puzzle I can solve. I have taken away power from the GM to do whatever he wants and given it to me in the form of crunchy bits on my character. In a Simulation I still have rules, and an even greater sense that the rules will be followed because they define the reality we're trying to simulate - I have been given no explicit or implicit promises that I won't be led by circumstance into events entirely outside my ability, but the world will work the way the world works. But in a Narrative game my power only extends as far as the GM's sense of the story - if we're at odds, I have no recourse other than leaving, and can get railroaded wherever he wants or be put through hell because it's more "dramatic". Any control I have is part of an implicit agreement that the GM will take my wishes into account in the direction of the story, which is only as good as the GMs word.
Now, I can guess that the mutation started because people enjoyed the Narrativist style but not the loss of control under a bad GM, and started developing rules for player empowerment to let give players more control in the direction of the story. Fine and dandy, but that's a Gamist solution - there are now contractual rules for setting an enjoyable challenge. Don't try to sell me that the enjoyable challenge for Narrativsts is "telling a good story" because in my youth I spent many a Gamist afternoon setting enjoyable challenges that, when we were done, made good stories - they weren't classic stories, but they also weren't always the ones told at cons that make no sense to the people who weren't there' because they're all about HP loss and Backstab opportunities. I'll accept a blending of the two under a new term (just like I prefer Genereist for games that blend Narrative and Simulation) but it takes some through-the-looking-glass logic to get to the point where Narrativist means Player Empowerment when it's the least Player Empowering of the styles.
Both
mylescorcoranand notthebuddhaused the term "Effects based" to define systems like GURPS and CHAMPIONS, where powers are defined entirely by what they do, not how they do it. My 10d6 laser beam is mechanically identical to your 10d6 lightning bolt. From a game mechanics perspective it's a reasonable enough way to handle powers. However, both then contrasted it to Narrative Based. Now, I don't see Effect being contrasted by Narrative - I see Effect as contrasted by Cause. In a Cause Based system, which is where I’d put Villains & Vigilantes, my 2d8 laser beam is substantially different than your 2d8 Lightning Bolt. It generates different outcomes, is more or less effective against different defenses, because the Cause - light vs. lightning - is just as important than the mechanical Effect of delivering 2d8 damage.
In most cases those attacks are defined as part of broader powers - Light Powers and Lightning Control - that give a variety of different effects. If I want to illuminate a room I can do it with Light Powers rather easily, radiating light of any intensity or hue; you can do it with your lightning control as well, but by making an arclight between your fingers for harsh glare and heavy shadows. I can precision melt a steel door, you can't, but you can short out a computer, or perhaps even control it. Some of these would come naturally, and there would be clear mechanics written on the character sheet; some would not, and would have to be invented during play - the system had rules for inventing as well, which were manipulated to this purpose.
To me, this is a better system, as it cuts closer to the reality of comics, and it's what I'd like to see in my supers setting construction kit. I see it as containing a certain comic book logic in the setting that the players can define. I know from experience that this definition will occur anyway in a long term, maintained world. The vagaries of dice and player choices over 20 years of the Variants universe meant that Lightning Control was nearly always tied to increased strength and agility - the lightning controllers would electrify their reflexes and galvanize their muscles. Light control was nearly always tied with heightened intelligence, as their thoughts moved at lightspeed. Flame powers carried super strength and endurance. This just fell out over time, and became an engrained part of the setting, as regular as people with flame powers being able to immolate themselves and fly. It made the Variants universe distinct from the Marvel and DC ones that it inevitably sprang from. That's what I want to present in the kit - the chance to build a distinct world that is not hindered by how useful someone else somewhere thought an energy blast would be compared to invisibility, or that everyone who can run fast can vibrate through walls. Maybe they can. And maybe invisibility is incredibly rare and useful, or common and predictable. But it's the players choice.
But the decision that light powers makes me smarter or lets me carve holes in walls isn't related to the Narrative in any way. Since by simple inference on the term Narrative, Narrative based powers means I can use my light powers in whichever way best improves the story. If that means thinking at lightspeed, I do that. If it means flying on a stream of hard photons, I do that too. I might not remember to do it next session when it wouldn't serve the narrative, but, hey, that happens in comics all the time. But I'm not interested in Narrative based powers because it's too free-form. I want mechanics on the sheet indicating how good I am with my Light Powers and what I have learned to do with it, with a broad understanding of what I won't be able to get it to do. I know the Cause, and I want the Effects to tie to that, not to be ends unto themselves or be dependent on the current story.
Mylescorcoran as said this " but it is very much in the broader sense (in the hobby) of Narrative as player-empowerment."
When did Narrative become player empowerment?
Narrativist means you're trying to craft a compelling, or at least interesting, story. Gamist means you're trying to set a enjoyable challenge within the rules. Simulationist means you're trying to accurately create a reality (even if that reality has rules totally unlike our own). In a Gamist setting I have the most player empowerment because I have, written on my character sheet, exactly what I can and can't do, and the GM is obliged to give me a puzzle I can solve. I have taken away power from the GM to do whatever he wants and given it to me in the form of crunchy bits on my character. In a Simulation I still have rules, and an even greater sense that the rules will be followed because they define the reality we're trying to simulate - I have been given no explicit or implicit promises that I won't be led by circumstance into events entirely outside my ability, but the world will work the way the world works. But in a Narrative game my power only extends as far as the GM's sense of the story - if we're at odds, I have no recourse other than leaving, and can get railroaded wherever he wants or be put through hell because it's more "dramatic". Any control I have is part of an implicit agreement that the GM will take my wishes into account in the direction of the story, which is only as good as the GMs word.
Now, I can guess that the mutation started because people enjoyed the Narrativist style but not the loss of control under a bad GM, and started developing rules for player empowerment to let give players more control in the direction of the story. Fine and dandy, but that's a Gamist solution - there are now contractual rules for setting an enjoyable challenge. Don't try to sell me that the enjoyable challenge for Narrativsts is "telling a good story" because in my youth I spent many a Gamist afternoon setting enjoyable challenges that, when we were done, made good stories - they weren't classic stories, but they also weren't always the ones told at cons that make no sense to the people who weren't there' because they're all about HP loss and Backstab opportunities. I'll accept a blending of the two under a new term (just like I prefer Genereist for games that blend Narrative and Simulation) but it takes some through-the-looking-glass logic to get to the point where Narrativist means Player Empowerment when it's the least Player Empowering of the styles.
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I'm not sure what a narrativist approach would be. But I don't think it would be either Cause or Effect.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the GURPS approach has at least some element of Cause-based. That is, if you use the mechanics of GURPS Powers, you define a theme for a power, which includes a bunch of specific abilities that share a common physical or supernatural mechanism; and you define a source, which is something like divine, magical, chi, psionic, or mutant, which is the cause of your having access to that mechanism, and which gives you limitations based on how the mechanism works—for example, if your source is Magical then your powers will fail in a no-mana zone.
Bill Stoddard
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Over time, the (Forge) dialogue re nar/sim/gam ended up coming down to a question of creative agenda -- specifically, what are the players creative agenda, and how are they pursuing that by interacting with the game.
In gamism, that's easy -- their agenda is to be challenged and overcome those challenges with a chance of failure, and the game allows them to pursue it by giving them challenges and letting them succeed or fail at them, and rewarding them for doing so.
In simulationism, that's hard -- their agenda is to make a consistent and believable X (where X is a simulated reality, a believable emulation of a genre or world, or whatnot), and they foster it by ? (where the Big Model has a big problem shoehorning Sim into its model in a coherent fashion).
In narrativism, that's interesting -- the player agenda is to have a compelling and coherent story, but having the GM provide such a story isn't an interesting game, or, really, much of a game at all. So the game supports the agenda by letting player actions influence and create the story, and making player choices meaningful in directing the choices; having the story develop from play and directing play to produce a coherent story.
Basically, the model is all about player empowerment -- regardless of creative agenda. This is a problem for Simulationism, because if you put it into the same box as Gam/Nar, rather than an entirely different box entirely, Sim is close to the antithesis of player empowerment (if you put it into a different box, you get Sim/Gam and Sim/Nar, both of which work better as long as you remember that the game is first about being a game or about creating a story, and only then about following your rules and having a coeherent dream), but it works just fine for the other two skews.
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I'm comfortable with that, as long as the player group is appealing to the same set of physics as relates to the world. I recall someone on Pyramid having the sig line of "he understands physics better than you do, but you understand comic book physics better than he does". That's what I'm aiming for in the kit, but where everyone has a say in what the comic book physics of the world are: in DC super speed leads to vibrating through walls; in Marvel it doesn't; in your world, who knows?
As for the GURPS aspect, that's true, to a point. To really get it to work the way I would like you'd need Wildcard Abilities or one of the other mechanics from supers to give the player the needed creative range. Even still you're bound by some point cost issues inherent in the game, where things that make logical sense are out of reach because the underlying effects have been determined to be more expensive than the character can afford. That's a problem with point systems in general, not GURPS in specific.
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They foster it by agreeing to the operating rules of the emulation, under the interpretation of the referee/emulation designer. That's not hard at all. My empowerment is that the GM has no means or reason to direct my actions.
Look, if I agree to play in one of whswhs's games - and whswhs is an avowed simulationist - then my agenda is to explore the ramifications of a simulated reality. I can keep pushing the boundaries of the world to see how it reacts, and as long as it continues to react in a fashion consistent with the simulated reality, I'm happy. We're both happy, because we're both helping to explore this world and see how it reacts.
As a player I'm totally empowered - if I decide that rather than doing what I'm doing I want to quit my job and become a caravan guard across the desert then I can damn well do that - the GM doesn't have to make the desert exciting enough to challenge my character, he doesn't have to stop me from doing so because it doesn't make narrative sense, and the caravan doesn't have to suddenly be important to the machinations of my evil step-mother and her plans to rule the kingdom because that's what was happening before. He just has to present me with what would rationally be in the desert. That could be glossing over weeks of tedium and exchanging anecdotes with the other guards. It could be getting turned down, or given all the scut work, because I don't have the skills needed to be a caravan guard, if that's what logically happens. But I'm empowered - I can try anything, which might succeed or fail, be incredibly easy or immediately deadly - with no expectation that it will form an interesting STORY. It might just form an interesting LIFE.
I just don't see the argument that Simulation denies player empowerment as holding water. It looks more like this definition of Simulationism was constructed by people who weren't Simulationists and had no interest in talking to them about what they enjoyed in gaming.
Secondary to that, why take an existing, basically functional model and obfuscate it by re-defining all the terms? Was the goal to make communication more difficult?
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To an extent, the BM Nar (and to an extent, Gam) definitions are superior to what came before--they put gamism and narrativism on the same spectrum, give a point to nar rather than just "I want it to have a story", and conciously exclude gming-by-railroad as not-nar. OTOH, probably because of who was involved, as you mention, the depiction of simulationism is -awful-, mixing sim up with bad gaming, and constructing reasoning why you can't mix sim and nar that doesn't make much sense.
Now that I think on it, this may be because the thing identified as uniting the three ? Doesn't.
As you mention, the key point of simulationism is exploring -- the shared reality. "What if I go here?" "put ghost rock in acid?" "ignore the nonsense with the king and head for a ship to the indies?"
Similarly, the key point of narrativism is to explore the story, and by an extention, the characters.
But gamism, while quite worthwhile, is only pushed into an "exploration" mold by extreme force; if you want exploration with your gamism, you have to get it somewhere else than your urge for conflict and real opposition.
Basically, I think the Big Model idea of having different "skews" that bind together the different components of roleplaying is a good one. But I'm not at all convinced that Gamism, Simulationism, and Naratativsm are all the same -kind- of skew.
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I was afraid that this was going to happen.
My comments, at least, are not based on the Forgeite ideas of G/N/S. That's not to say that I disagree with those ideas; rather, I have never been able to understand the explanations of them sufficiently to be confident of understanding them, and I have repeatedly been told things about what counts as an example of each that strike me as counterintuitive in relation to my own knowledge of games, narratives, and simulations. That's why I did not use the capitalized forms Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism, which seem to be favored by a lot of Forgeites; I hoped to avoid suggesting that I was using Forgeite concepts or terminology in my remarks.
If you care to respond to what I said in terms of an ordinary, common sense understanding of the English language, setting aside all your knowledge of Forge theories, I will be interested in what you have to say. I'm afraid anything you say that's based on the assumption that I'm talking about Forgeite ideas is going to be completely unrelated to what I was actually trying to say.
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The point is, no, narrativism doesn't require empowerment. None of gam/nar/sim do, not by their approach. But all good, functional gaming does; without player empowerment, you're not playing a game, but telling a story to your friends where they are passive observers.
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Gaming = "Playing a roleplaying game" for this purpose.
If you're playing a roleplaying game -- not watching someone else play, not listening to someone else tell you a story or lecture you -- you must be empowered to be part of that play, to have your actions -- your "moves" matter.
It's not that it's not a functional game if you're not empowered. It's that it's not -play-.
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In a model of superhuman conflicts, if some characters have power X, and others have power X/10, the ones with power X/10 are likely not to have a meaningful effect on the outcome, and can properly be disregarded. And conversely, too powerful a character, say 10X, is going to have an overwhelming impact, like doing a model of the early solar system with a superjovian planet in place. So it's legitimate to set a restriction on the power levels that well be considered, a restriction not of kind but of magnitude. And the point budget of games such as GURPS is an attempt to approximate such a restriction. It may not work perfectly, but what it's trying to do is a legitimate goal.
And my goals in running a game aren't pure simulation; they also have game and narrative aspects. From that perspective, an engine may give us the tool to simulate "anything," for certain values of "anything," but that doesn't mean that I want to simulate anything; I may want to simulate something in particular. What that something is may be shaped by the goal of having a narrative in a certain range emerge from play; it may also be shaped by the goal of having balanced conflicts—which is a gamist goal, but also a narrativist one: the moment when the dice come out is the rpg version of the agony of classic epic and drama, the point where the struggle becomes totally serious. If one side in the conflict is so much more capable than the other that there's no chance of meaning opposition, then I don't have a conflict, or a game, or a dramatically interesting climax for a story. And having that sort of thing is what I'm using the simulationist tools for in the first place.
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What I'm arguing is that point systems impose problems based on the mechanisms the designers used when determinging power cost. I don't know GURPS well enough to easily pick out specific cases, but here's an example from Tri-Stat (with the SAS costings): my hero with Power Flux (Light Powers) has a 5 Flux Points for use with Light Powers. He can, if he so chooses, turn completely invisible to normal sight (Invisibility costs out a 3 points per sense), fire lasers with more damage potential than a handgun (special attack, 4 pts for 20 damage), fly on a stream of hard photons with perfect control at 10 mph (flight, 4 pts per level) or glide on them at 50 kph (gliding, 2 pts per level), construct a hard photon shield that will block small arms fire (force field, 4 pts per level), sense the presence or absence of light in distant areas (sixth sense, 1 pt per sense) and even convert his body into a swarm of photons similar to a cloud of mosquitoes (swarm, 2 pts per level). What he can't do is absorb light (damage absorption 8 points per level, or damage conversion, 6 points per level), or craft holograms with a radius of more than 10 cm. (projection, 3 points per level, with level determing radius.) However, while he can't make a hologram that would cover his body, he could coat himself with a hard photon sheath with a varying appearance to make himself look like other people (alternate form, shapeshifting option, 2 points total).
That sort of distinction is where my problem comes in. How is it that the character can do so many other things with light but can't make a moderate sized hologram or absorb light? And the reason why he can't is not because of any appeal to the physics of the universe (if we were doing that, I would have chucked out the photon swarm idea toot sweet), but because the Tri-Stat design team decided that the ability to convert minimal amounts of energy into character points was twice as costly as being totally invisible to sight. That's my concern with point systems in Cause based power systems. It's not an insoluable one, but it is nagging.
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It's like the Big Model designers were attacked by a copy of Harn as a kid or something....
if you want exploration with your gamism, you have to get it somewhere else than your urge for conflict and real opposition.
I don't see that, either. If I'm playing for Gamist reasons I want things to be a challenge, and will work within the system to maxamize effect. If I realize (as one of my more Gamist players has) that I can explore the world to gain benefits in my conflicts and against my opposition - in other words if I am exploring the world as a puzzle - then I will do so. I'll explore the history and culture of the Bear people because I can get a +2 circumstance bonus on Bluff & Diplomacy rolls to pass through their territory unscathed if I mention stories of their great heroes. It's still conflict and real opposition, but exploring the world was just as useful to me, and cheaper, than a Cloak of Charisma +2, and better still, it STACKS! I'm still interested in the world, still exploring it, but my brain is ticking over how I can use it to better solve the challenges I face, and how doing so makes me a better, more successful adventurer than those who don't.
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In order to have a "good, functional game" the players have to be empowered - their decisions have to have an impact on the outcome of the game.
It is possible to GM in a gamist style (i.e. gamism) and not let the character's decisions have an impact on the outcome: the challenges are stacked too much in favor of specific strategies, the NPCs have such high social skills that the PCs are directed from one situation to another, and so on. The players contribution is reduced to rolling dice or dying if they make a wrong decision. This is probably best described as Killer DM style - I'll buldgeon you with the rules but claim it's fair because of the rules.
It is possible to GM in the narrative style and not let the players decisions have an impact on the outcome: this is Railroading, pure and simple.
It is theoretically possible to run in the a simulation and not let the players decisions have any impact on the outcome: this is lecturing, or perhaps playing tour guide, where you show them all the facets of your lovely cimulated world, with which they cannot interact because they are alien elements. While the players can choose where they go next, their characters can take only pictures, leave only footprints.
In these three modes - Killer GM, Railroading, Tour Guide - they aren't games you can actually *play* because you don't actually get meaningful moves. Imagine it as chess where the only piece you have is one pawn, and it's limited to the far row of the board while your opponent moves all the other peices. You're not playing chess, your deciding to move your pawn from R5 to R4 or R5 to R6. Killer GMs will eventually come and take your pawn. Railroad GMs will eventually move their king to the rook position so you end the game taking it with "a moment of triumph!" Tour Guide GMs will ingore the rook row entirely, lest you upset the clever piece movements he's trying to show you. But you're not playing chess because you don't get meaningful moves.
Apparently part of the Big Model is to draw a circle around the three gaming styles that excludes Killer GMs, Railroad GMs and (perhaps) Tour Guide GMs with the statement that what they produce are not functioning games and therefore are not things we want to capture in the model. Just like your earlier solar system resolution questions regarding planetesmials and super-Jovians, they just simply fall outside the discussion of how to improve good functional gaming because they aren't "good functional gaming".
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(I'll be more cogent later, once I've had a chance to catch up.)
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I don't buy that Narrative means (solely) interest in and techniques for crafting a story. The idea that "Any control I have is part of an implicit agreement that the GM will take my wishes into account in the direction of the story" is a nonsense compared to the actual rules of, say, Dogs in the Vineyard, which I would take as very much a Narrativist game, but one without a central 'story authority'.
No one of the Big Model agendas is more or less player-empowering, I feel, though I'd be willing to accept that everyone (GM included) in a Simulationist game gives over some (even most) power to the setting, or shared fictional world and its rules.
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Or playing with GMs who read too many of Gary Gygax's Dragon editorials.
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(Anonymous) 2008-04-11 01:25 pm (UTC)(link)Sorry, got a hard photon in my eye.
Which brings me to the rubber science here. The character can "manipulate light" -- that's the Cause. Okay. So lasers, invisibility, holograms -- I'll give you all of that.
But the "hard photons" for flying and armor just reek of game mechanics. That's bending the Cause to allow game-essential abilities (if he can't fly and stop bullets, he's not going to be much of a superhero, so we come up with "hard photons").
It seems that doing Cause-based powers should include some kind of ground rules about how much rubber science you're going to allow. Can a super-speedster like the Flash accomplish pretty much any damned thing by running around in a circle really fast?
This is why we have effects-based systems, I think. Nobody wants to spend the game arguing about "hard photons" or what you can accomplish with a superfast vortex.
There ought to be some way to keep the best of both worlds -- let the guy with light powers bend the searchlight beams even though he never bought Darkness or Suppress (Change Environment: Light) or whatever. But also allow the GM and any right-thinking player to call BS on the hard photons.
Maybe allow a certain number of "power schticks" based on the Cause? Plausible ones are cheap or free, but ones which require lots of handwaving are expensive? So to get "hard photons" out of your light powers costs a lot of accumulated experience, but learning how to bend light beams is free?
Cambias
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(which is to say one game.)
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In a game, the player can say, "the rules say, on p. X, column n, that you do such and such in this situation."
In a narrative, the player can say, "we've established that my character is motivated by P, and not by Q; so it's not plausible for them to do A in this situation."
In a simulation, the player can say, "the laws of nature in this setting include such and such; so if my character can do X, they ought to be able to do Y and Z."
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In particular, I kept running into the statement that if you decided that things in your game world worked like X, and simply forced things to happen according to X directly, that you were "simulating" the fictional world that was the source for X. And I'd reflect that if I programmed my computer with a model of planetesimals orbiting a central mass, colliding, and sticking or bouncing, and the result of every single run was a star orbited solely by worlds of terrestrial mass or less—I would have to either say, "Okay, we're simulating an alternative cosmogony" or go in and change the basic parameters of the model till it produced solar systems with gas giants a reasonable part of the time, to simulate the real world where (many) solar systems have gas giants. But if I just stepped in and wrote a line of code to introduce gas giants at time T because I wanted them to be there and my model wasn't giving them to me—that would not be a simulation of solar system formation at all.
I eventually came to speculate that the Big Model was formulated by people who in fact detested simulation, and so were trying to define it from the outside, with no understanding of it.
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Well, it would if it weren't the power basis for Dr. Light, the long standing Green Lantern/Teen Titans villain, and used in other places in the DC Canon. (And there's little Thor can't do if he spins the damn hammer fast enough! He used it as a cyclotron once, for pity's sake!)
But yes, I agree that it's a load of hooey if you're sticking with conventional physics at all. I should probably do a more proper post of the grounding for my supers setting construction kit idea (which has been discussed more extensively in A&E), but the basis of it is that when the campaign begins there is no pre-set powers list. The players say what they want their characters powers to be and how they work - they define the powers as a set of causes. They can then apply a Scarcity cost to them - how much people have to pay to even get the power at all (which I posted in a Pyramid article some time back). This discussion gives the framework on roughly how powers physics work in the setting.
Players then purchase those powers by defining their Potency and Versatility. Characters with the highest Potency Super-Strength will be able to lift and throw the greatest amounts of weight available for super strength, defined when the players hashed out the causes. But if he buys the highest potency with the lowest versatility, he won't be able to do much with it - the player has signed on that his character won't use his vast strength in a wide variety of ways. Someone with a lower Potency Super-Strength might crank up the Versatility and use it to tunnel, flick ball bearings at supersonic speed, give gusts of super-breath, leap vast distances and so on - he's not as strong but he is more versatile. Versatility has weaker boundaries than Potency does in the initial dicussion, but the outside edges have to be sketched so that everyone knows what they're working with. Right now I have a player pick a number of standard shticks based on a powers Versatility, with higher versatility making it easier to develop new ones.
There's a fourth component - Frequency - which determines how often the character relies on the power. As with versatility, this is a formalization of a player contract - it's why Superman starts with his strength and invulnerability rather than solving every problem with super-speed. Flash has all his points tied up in a high Potency, high Versatility, high Frequency super speed, and it won't do for Superman to also solve all his problems with his super speed, even if it is nearly as good.
That's where things stand right now. I think it's pretty close to what you're suggesting.
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That there can be narrativist literary works is more or less obvious. But let me tell a story to illustrate how one might say that a literary work is distinctively narrativist: Years and years ago, my then roommate was taking a course in set design, and was trying to work out the stage set for a play that her college was putting on. She asked me for advice on something. And I pointed at one of her walls, and asked her, "What's on the other side of this wall here?" And she looked at me blankly for a moment, and then said that there was nothing on the other side of that wall; it was the back of the stage, and whatever was behind it would not come into the action of the play. And I said that to visualize that the front of the wall looked like, I had to know what I was supposed to imagine as existing on the other side of the wall—which she had never thought about, because the drama was only taking place on one side of the wall.
So I think there is an approach to literature where the characters, the people you are bringing on stage or telling a story about, are "real," and what happens to them is real and is defined—but nothing that is not directly interacting with them has any substance, because it's not part of the narrative.
There is a simulationist interest in literature. It often has to do with envisioning a world with its own natural laws, its own geography and biology and cosmogony and so on, and working out how it functions as a self-consistent whole. This is the kind of thing that's found in Poul Anderson's fiction, or Hal Clement's, or that of other hard science fiction writers.
And there's also a gamist approach in literature. For example, the classic murder mystery is a game between the author and the reader: the author reveals all the clues, and the reader knows as much as the investigator, and is challenged to solve the mystery faster than the investigator does. Note that readers of such works talk about the author "playing fair" with the reader.
Or, for aspects of formal contest, consider the traditional Japanese custom of an exchange of verses between two people, each person's verse being expected to take off from what the other person just sent. For that matter, all traditional verse, verse that scans and perhaps rhymes and may be in a defined form, has a "game" aspect. Once you've written lines AbA' of a villanelle, the succeeding verses MUST rhyme aba, and must end alternately by repeating line A and line A' as the third line, until the final verse is abAA'. That purely artificial structural requirement makes writing villanelles something of a game.
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Exactly. Which is part of what I'm trying to build. Imagine the defining of Causes as being analgous to a PtA Pitch session, where everyone agrees to how the supers setting will work rather than be bound by what some designer who isn't at the table thought was a good balance some two decades ago.
No, on to the other part of this thread....
The idea that "Any control I have is part of an implicit agreement that the GM will take my wishes into account in the direction of the story" is a nonsense compared to the actual rules of, say, Dogs in the Vineyard, which I would take as very much a Narrativist game, but one without a central 'story authority'.
OK, I haven't read DotV, so I might be out of line here, but I am sticking with my earlier counter argument to this - the development of those rules was to take the decision making away from the GM (and, based on the anecdote in A&E this month of how DotV originated as a means to prevent strong personality players from overbearing their fellows, from the other players) and giving it to the rules is an inherently Gamist solution. Everyone sitting down at the table might well be agreeing that their goal is to create a good story. The game's setting might explicity deny the GM the right to make moral judgements or force issues (because that's the PCs job in DotV), which shifts narrative tools to the players. But the implementation is a Gamist one. The player who has the best understanding of the game mechanics can manipulate them to have the greatest effect on the story and best overcome the challenges presented by the GM.
No style of play is 100% G, N or S
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The player who has the best understanding of the game mechanics can manipulate them to have the greatest effect on the story and best overcome the challenges presented by the GM.
Hmm. Any implementation in rules is going to be a Gamist implementation in that case and that seems too sweeping to me. There are rules that support focusing on character, conflict and emergent story, and there are rules that provide game challenges and reward the tactical-minded (for example) player. Of course, no one rule or set of rules is 100% one and not any of the others.
I can where the Gamist approach works to curb a dominant or inflexible GM, but I can also see where the Narrativist approach gives everyone a stake in establishing interesting and compelling characters and conflicts, working to address a theme.
I can also see that I'm not really invested in the Big Model and how bandying GNS terms about gets confusing. When are we going to see this supers setting construction kit?
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We're just looking for the right level of flakeyness.
No wait, that didn't sound right....
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Sorry to interrupt!
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Mind you, what I'm talking about is a contiuum between the three points, not either/or. But if you decide to enforce the way the group forms a narrative by instituting rules for conflict resolution then you are leaning Gamist. To my mind this is a GOOD thing, and will likely improve the narrative (and the simulation, because there will be a more consistent set of outcomes). The group may still be getting together with the goal of crafting an interesting story, but they've changed the way they're leaning in how they resolve it.
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Of course you guys are having fun. I happen to think that teasing Brian is fun, too...