Loath as I am to first-comment this tremendous piece with such trivial corrections, it remains the only flaw I've found. Well done - you are accomplishing with rigor a dream I had long since abandoned: that of formalizing gamemastering advice. And with such panache!
Well, the grammar is tricky here because you are imposing, in theory, multiple requirements on the explanations but in a single pass, with the collective acting as a single filter. Thus, “a criteria” made sense to me. However, you are not wrong. Thank you for the kind remark!
I'm always thinking of ways to get robots to play the game for me. Call it the curse of my vocation.
It strikes me that a knowledge graph might be highly suited to tracking a complex campaign canon. It could be used to automatically rule out invalid abductive justifications.
Sorry for my fragmented notes/questions, I don’t expect it all to be addressed, only wished to share my thoughts. Please forgive if I include any faulty assumptions.
Some observations:
Protean vs. Labyrinthine is an excellent distinction, the fact you dealt with this separately to Simulationism surprised me at first (I intuited that Labyrinthine rules and Simulationism were the same thing) but I see now that they should be conceptualised separately.
The terms, Protean vs. Labyrinthine, are introduced initially talking about an approach to either building an immense house of cards of House Rules, vs. a core of permanent rules supplemented by rulings. These terms then move to referring to not only rules and systems but the facts about the campaign, lore, did you articulate this dual application? The crossover is clear and unifying them is clearly possible and helpful… But could you not have a ‘Protean’ approach to the lore and a ‘Labyrinthine’ approach to the rules? They are alike but separate in my eyes… am I misunderstanding? (Likely you addressed this and I can’t find in the text.)
Assuming a ‘Protean’ Campaign canon… is a convenient structure implied by this that could help form a ‘Campaign Canon’ document? For sure this could be done in simple notation form within a notebook but if we imagine a ‘Knowable Game World’ with a campaign manager and multiple referees there should be a reliable form for a this document a database of the campaign with a number of tags for data points? As minimal as is possible? Problem: Date would seem the obvious primary organising principle for these datapoints or ‘injections’, but each point, as for example your example of “a violent cultist kidnapped the colleague”, this injection point is added at the date the kidnap happened, it has backwards implications time wise though… It could Abductively Justify past and future events in the campaign… this introduces the overlapping circles of complexity you discuss, could the ‘Campaign Canon’ be organisable in a way to help a campaign manager with this? … may there need to be some practical limit on the amount of Abductive Reasoning applied… If I take on low prep assumptions, I would assume that when the players touch something, this dictates how far this reasoning goes?
The incredible value of a shared set of fantasy tropes, an ‘appendix n’ if you will, became increasingly evident as I read through this piece. The amount of work it would remove if there are thousands of cultural touchpoints, ‘of course’, moments waiting to be drawn on throughout the Secondary World.
From a lore perspective, do we move further from the ‘Protean’ core as a campaign is played in? Has this ever been observed? A larger number of data points or injections would begin to constrain a referee no?
I am not sure I see how ‘Degeneracy’ would eliminate contradictions? As you seem to suggest, am I misunderstanding? Or could you provide an example?
Thank you for taking the time to put together these thoughts. Since your questions are so well-aimed at the heart of the matter, I will do my best to bang out some clarifications.
I originally tried to write this piece in the Common Law vs. Civil Law framing of @Alexander Macris. In this framing, he relates rules to laws and rulings to (legal) rulings, and he uses the concept of binding precedent, in both its presence and absence, to explore the correct treatment of rulings. However, I found that as I was writing, the philosophical nuances of legal systems did not seem to apply neatly to the problems I was working on. I realized that what I needed was a comparison that was strictly about the nature of rulings in the midst of RPG gameplay. When moving along these lines of thinking, it rapidly becomes clear that a particular stance towards rulings is optimally served by a particular kind of ruleset; this will become important later.
The primary distinction I landed on was the distinction of received vs. imposed knowledge of the gameworld. The Labyrinthine stance has a strong preference for receiving answers from some fully objective third-party (the Labyrinth, which is my metaphor for the ruleset), whereas the Protean stance is that information will always be incomplete and that the nature of events will (often) be subject to interpretation or “prophecy”, i.e. places where an explicit ruleset will come short for structural reasons.
If I say “Protean ruleset”, I am severely overloading the terminology. I am not speaking of a ruleset which is, somehow, Protean in nature but instead am saying “a ruleset optimized for use by someone taking a Protean stance towards rulings”. For example, a ruleset that separates all activities via strict descriptive boundaries is probably a “Labyrinthine ruleset”. Not only is it structured like a map, showing you where to go for each activity, but it implicitly “denies” that any activity could fall outside of its defined perimeter. In subtle ways, it “rejects” the notion of certain kinds of negative space (a topic I will expand upon in the future).
With all that said, the surprising conclusion I arrived at was that Abductive Justification operates in an explicitly Protean manner. It presumes a degree and quality (and role) of ignorance about the gameworld that does not conform neatly to the Labyrinthine desire to receive a correct answer from an objective third-party. This is not to say that the Labyrinthine must have an infinitely “prepped” or filled-out or “completed” gameworld; instead it is acknowledging that answering the question “given that I’m seeing A and B together, what is the explanation?” is very difficult within the “received knowledge” paradigm and makes much more sense in the “imposed knowledge” paradigm.
The question of how to document a campaign, especially one shared across multiple game-runners, should be stance-agnostic. The two stances (and I know I said this already, but no practical approach to RPG gameplay is either completely Protean or Labyrinthine) are focused on the production of gameworld history (i.e. campaign canon), and recording & communicating that comes down to recording important events.
But in the course of play, RPGs create objects and situations. A game-runner who is aware of the campaign canon (i.e. what things have happened) is armed with the ability to connect the dots between new events and old events (and this capability increases as his understanding of campaign canon increases). In campaigns like Drakonheim or UMBROS, the SEEN system accounts for this because each player is publicizing (sometimes incomplete) information about some activity his character underwent or saw or so on, and everyone’s collective understanding of the campaign canon is increasing at the same rate. New ideas are occasionally connected to old ideas, and their collision creates events which become the matter of public posts.
And all along the way, we see a consistent pattern of knowledge becoming generally “more concrete” over time. The first time someone encounters a campaign entity, they only have an initial impression, but further encounters with the same entity will crystallize that entity’s nature and behavior until there is no longer any need to exercise choice or judgment. From the character perspective, they are uncovering unknown but extant information. From the player perspective, this entity’s dossier is becoming filled in through a combination of generative systems, apophenia & abductive reasoning, and game-runner rulings or similar on-the-spot judgments.
By this process, the idea is that a campaign will evolve a distinct identity which is a combination of character decisions (made by players, obviously), the character of the ruleset being used, the literary canon invoked across the participants, and the dice steering things along the way. The formation of this identity is a direct result of the crystallizing effect of the campaign canon becoming developed. This means that even the most “abusive” Protean stance we could imagine will eventually run out of footing to create ex nihilo; the mounting constraints will box him in so that his future “decisions” merely reinforce the campaign identity already established through the development of campaign canon.
The nature of this crystallization is that it typically has diminishing returns. The first time you pull a fact from complete ignorance, it establishes a lot of constraints on future decisions. Each further abductive “clarification” establishes less and less until you’re no longer adding information about a subject but instead just repeating the information already emanating from the subject. This is related to the idea of Abductive Justification reaching into the past. The farther back you have to reach, the more careful you have to be about touching things already established—they often don’t have enough wiggle room to land where you need them to be to avoid contradiction. This is why you’ll often see one or two big “leaps” of Abductive Justification that end up setting a broad standard or directionality for many things.
As for the question about causal degeneracy, consider the following example: If I go into the grocery store and find that the price of ground beef has increased 40%, and I operate on the “efficient market” presumptions, then I can contemplate potential reasons for this. Perhaps the supply of beef dropped or the demand for energy spiked. In the real world, we can follow up on and investigate these matters with data; for example, if the energy demand spiked, we would see price increases across the board. But either way, presuming we are too ignorant to currently answer that question, we know that many combinations of these causes could result in exactly the same 40% price increase.
In an RPG context, causal degeneracy is special because it gives us the ability to choose or imply a cause that—in the context of our knowledge of campaign canon—seems fitting. Note that this is necessarily simulationist; we are not merely inventing any fact we like but instead demanding that effects are the result of causes.
If reality—in particular the gameworld reality—was simplistic, then each effect or outcome could be traced to a single cause. In this regime, the concept of a Protean stance towards rulings is nonsensical. When the game presents a fact, the cause is clear; there is no decision to make. When the game fails to present a relevant fact, the Protean’s “choice” is false; whatever choice he makes traces directly to a single cause—and we would be able to find the correct choice by identifying the one cause that accords with other known outcomes elsewhere.
However, reality is incredibly complex. Except in isolated environments, each effect has many thousands of causal inputs—and “The Cause” of that effect will be one of innumerable linear combinations of those causal inputs. When a Protean “chooses” an effect in this regime, causal degeneracy guarantees that there are many possible (valid) causes of that specific effect. In other words, because the effect could have resulted from many potential causes, the Protean can choose that effect and remain confident in its justification without needing a further validation process, such as a second-order analysis of the causes.
Thanks again for your interest and readership; I hope that clarifies at least a few of the topics you wondered about.
Thank you for the detailed answer! There is some fertile food for thought there… The problem for me is only that I need to play more to get a feel for it.
One final question would be: Is your aim here solely defining terms as a basis for having productive discussion on this topic? I can see how this shapes and supports some of the BrOSR pillars of play… Or do you see further scope to define the Protean way of play, inferring new ideas & methodologies to try out?
This question arrives to me a bit like "is this development or results?" When we're on the bleeding edge, development is a kind of result too. The second half of this article is what reactions seem to focus on, but I didn't even have it in mind when writing the article; I just wanted the first half. My attempts to broaden my understanding from that work have resulted in some ideas that ring true (and echo what others before have also formulated), and the conclusions I drew are far from obvious and are clearly hitting concepts under contention. Rest assured I will be following this line of thinking further.
My ultimate goal is a conceptual framework where people can discuss every aspect of RPGs without ambiguity. The places that I have ended up are surprising in many ways. The impetus that drives the BrOSR is an elevation of the concept of Truth and a respect for "what works". As long as my formulations seem to point towards the true nature of things, I have no doubt there will be strong alignment and a willingness to keep pushing on these ideas.
From "On Rules and Rulings" onward I will refer to as the second half of this article. It really would have been easier to consume as a separate post. I do like that you point out that the Protean approach (ad-hoc rulings) requires less cognitive effort whereas the Labyrinthine approach (hard rulings that will be carried forward in time as "house rules") requires searching the 'solution space' for an answer that achieves a 'best fit' for the campaign, rule system, and players. This approach is prone to be much harder to sustain and requires discipline and thoughtfulness that is beyond many Referees (sadly). It also might grind an exciting game session to a halt (sacrificing the short-term good for the long-term good).
I don't know that I have any criticisms here. I merely observe that Protean "rulings" have their own limitations (including capriciousness that can drive players to self-eject). Both mechanisms should be in the tool chest for a Referee.
Thanks for attempting to give us the words to describe the hobby. This kind of precision is sorely needed. It is probably worth taking a deeper dive into existing game theory. There may be some hidden gems in that literature (if you can stand the math / logic symbols).
The lackluster state of theoretical development is the entire reason I’m even writing this stuff. It seems like Archon had exactly the same feeling. The nature of RPGs already evades 95% of the analysis assumptions in the field, but most practitioners shove on bullishly through to (wrong) conclusions despite that. To be frank, the stuff that tries to address the unique qualities of RPGs is almost universally poor.
If anyone out there is reading this comment and feels like they have a gotcha for me, my body is ready. I want to read a serious work that doesn’t begin with completely laughable assumptions and/or a framing which specifically prevents them from walking into the rake for the 100th time.
For the first half of the article, I have one question regarding the Tale of Two Campaigns.
"In campaign X, the outcome of player actions could be characterized as the accumulation of unrelated events. In campaign Y, by contrast, the outcome of player actions was the focused development of existing canon.
In BrOSR parlance, the injections in campaign X have resulted in diffusion, while the injections in campaign Y resulted in convergence."
I am wondering if you have any off the cuff thoughts about a proper mixture of both collapsing threads leading to unification of events and convergence versus the value of novel injections that might tend to lead to diffusion but keep the world interesting? 70/30 perhaps? 80/20? 90/10?
To go back to a random wilderness encounter - should the Orcs we just rolled up be from an already known tribe (existing faction) or should these Orcs belong to an entirely new tribe perhaps migrating into the area (novelty)? Sometimes novelty leads to conflict or a shake up in existing factions too. The alien invasion forcing everyone to band together. The Spanish conquistadors causing tribes who had been dominated by the Aztecs to form a new alliance.
A real campaign (even a relatively fresh one) is too complex to hope to write down. These toy examples are provided to demonstrate the structural differences that result from different decisions in the process.
With that out of the way, the concept we’re trying to achieve I might call “Superconvergence.” This is where most every thread in the campaign realigns itself like a magnet toward some event imbued with cosmic urgency. These kinds of events have a way of “ending” a campaign, acting as a soft reset, or fundamentally changing the playing field, marking a distinct line between Pre-Event and Post-Event where the behavior and assumptions are different on both sides.
If we are trying to achieve Superconvergence, then the campaign manager should watch for dead ends. A lot of convergences have a way of “dying” after crawling into a certain corner—their latest resolution is imbued with some finality that makes it seem unfruitful (for a player) to keep them going. But we cannot achieve a Superconvergence without multiple independent convergences.. converging. Thus, the answer to your question is “we need enough loose-end events to invite the possibility of reawakening convergent threads of action”. Forgive the elaborate answer; it is something I haven’t figured out how to articulate yet.
I look forward to you figuring this last part out. Perhaps biology has the answer for you. It strikes me that random mutations are part of the way nature ensures a last "secret doors check" in a dead-end before the final curtain falls. These seem to be vanishingly rare. https://share.gemini.google/TL2CJj4qTPkh
> The concept of applying a selection criteria
Criterion! Singular!
Loath as I am to first-comment this tremendous piece with such trivial corrections, it remains the only flaw I've found. Well done - you are accomplishing with rigor a dream I had long since abandoned: that of formalizing gamemastering advice. And with such panache!
Well, the grammar is tricky here because you are imposing, in theory, multiple requirements on the explanations but in a single pass, with the collective acting as a single filter. Thus, “a criteria” made sense to me. However, you are not wrong. Thank you for the kind remark!
I'm always thinking of ways to get robots to play the game for me. Call it the curse of my vocation.
It strikes me that a knowledge graph might be highly suited to tracking a complex campaign canon. It could be used to automatically rule out invalid abductive justifications.
Sorry for my fragmented notes/questions, I don’t expect it all to be addressed, only wished to share my thoughts. Please forgive if I include any faulty assumptions.
Some observations:
Protean vs. Labyrinthine is an excellent distinction, the fact you dealt with this separately to Simulationism surprised me at first (I intuited that Labyrinthine rules and Simulationism were the same thing) but I see now that they should be conceptualised separately.
The terms, Protean vs. Labyrinthine, are introduced initially talking about an approach to either building an immense house of cards of House Rules, vs. a core of permanent rules supplemented by rulings. These terms then move to referring to not only rules and systems but the facts about the campaign, lore, did you articulate this dual application? The crossover is clear and unifying them is clearly possible and helpful… But could you not have a ‘Protean’ approach to the lore and a ‘Labyrinthine’ approach to the rules? They are alike but separate in my eyes… am I misunderstanding? (Likely you addressed this and I can’t find in the text.)
Assuming a ‘Protean’ Campaign canon… is a convenient structure implied by this that could help form a ‘Campaign Canon’ document? For sure this could be done in simple notation form within a notebook but if we imagine a ‘Knowable Game World’ with a campaign manager and multiple referees there should be a reliable form for a this document a database of the campaign with a number of tags for data points? As minimal as is possible? Problem: Date would seem the obvious primary organising principle for these datapoints or ‘injections’, but each point, as for example your example of “a violent cultist kidnapped the colleague”, this injection point is added at the date the kidnap happened, it has backwards implications time wise though… It could Abductively Justify past and future events in the campaign… this introduces the overlapping circles of complexity you discuss, could the ‘Campaign Canon’ be organisable in a way to help a campaign manager with this? … may there need to be some practical limit on the amount of Abductive Reasoning applied… If I take on low prep assumptions, I would assume that when the players touch something, this dictates how far this reasoning goes?
The incredible value of a shared set of fantasy tropes, an ‘appendix n’ if you will, became increasingly evident as I read through this piece. The amount of work it would remove if there are thousands of cultural touchpoints, ‘of course’, moments waiting to be drawn on throughout the Secondary World.
From a lore perspective, do we move further from the ‘Protean’ core as a campaign is played in? Has this ever been observed? A larger number of data points or injections would begin to constrain a referee no?
I am not sure I see how ‘Degeneracy’ would eliminate contradictions? As you seem to suggest, am I misunderstanding? Or could you provide an example?
Thank you
Thank you for taking the time to put together these thoughts. Since your questions are so well-aimed at the heart of the matter, I will do my best to bang out some clarifications.
I originally tried to write this piece in the Common Law vs. Civil Law framing of @Alexander Macris. In this framing, he relates rules to laws and rulings to (legal) rulings, and he uses the concept of binding precedent, in both its presence and absence, to explore the correct treatment of rulings. However, I found that as I was writing, the philosophical nuances of legal systems did not seem to apply neatly to the problems I was working on. I realized that what I needed was a comparison that was strictly about the nature of rulings in the midst of RPG gameplay. When moving along these lines of thinking, it rapidly becomes clear that a particular stance towards rulings is optimally served by a particular kind of ruleset; this will become important later.
The primary distinction I landed on was the distinction of received vs. imposed knowledge of the gameworld. The Labyrinthine stance has a strong preference for receiving answers from some fully objective third-party (the Labyrinth, which is my metaphor for the ruleset), whereas the Protean stance is that information will always be incomplete and that the nature of events will (often) be subject to interpretation or “prophecy”, i.e. places where an explicit ruleset will come short for structural reasons.
If I say “Protean ruleset”, I am severely overloading the terminology. I am not speaking of a ruleset which is, somehow, Protean in nature but instead am saying “a ruleset optimized for use by someone taking a Protean stance towards rulings”. For example, a ruleset that separates all activities via strict descriptive boundaries is probably a “Labyrinthine ruleset”. Not only is it structured like a map, showing you where to go for each activity, but it implicitly “denies” that any activity could fall outside of its defined perimeter. In subtle ways, it “rejects” the notion of certain kinds of negative space (a topic I will expand upon in the future).
With all that said, the surprising conclusion I arrived at was that Abductive Justification operates in an explicitly Protean manner. It presumes a degree and quality (and role) of ignorance about the gameworld that does not conform neatly to the Labyrinthine desire to receive a correct answer from an objective third-party. This is not to say that the Labyrinthine must have an infinitely “prepped” or filled-out or “completed” gameworld; instead it is acknowledging that answering the question “given that I’m seeing A and B together, what is the explanation?” is very difficult within the “received knowledge” paradigm and makes much more sense in the “imposed knowledge” paradigm.
The question of how to document a campaign, especially one shared across multiple game-runners, should be stance-agnostic. The two stances (and I know I said this already, but no practical approach to RPG gameplay is either completely Protean or Labyrinthine) are focused on the production of gameworld history (i.e. campaign canon), and recording & communicating that comes down to recording important events.
But in the course of play, RPGs create objects and situations. A game-runner who is aware of the campaign canon (i.e. what things have happened) is armed with the ability to connect the dots between new events and old events (and this capability increases as his understanding of campaign canon increases). In campaigns like Drakonheim or UMBROS, the SEEN system accounts for this because each player is publicizing (sometimes incomplete) information about some activity his character underwent or saw or so on, and everyone’s collective understanding of the campaign canon is increasing at the same rate. New ideas are occasionally connected to old ideas, and their collision creates events which become the matter of public posts.
And all along the way, we see a consistent pattern of knowledge becoming generally “more concrete” over time. The first time someone encounters a campaign entity, they only have an initial impression, but further encounters with the same entity will crystallize that entity’s nature and behavior until there is no longer any need to exercise choice or judgment. From the character perspective, they are uncovering unknown but extant information. From the player perspective, this entity’s dossier is becoming filled in through a combination of generative systems, apophenia & abductive reasoning, and game-runner rulings or similar on-the-spot judgments.
By this process, the idea is that a campaign will evolve a distinct identity which is a combination of character decisions (made by players, obviously), the character of the ruleset being used, the literary canon invoked across the participants, and the dice steering things along the way. The formation of this identity is a direct result of the crystallizing effect of the campaign canon becoming developed. This means that even the most “abusive” Protean stance we could imagine will eventually run out of footing to create ex nihilo; the mounting constraints will box him in so that his future “decisions” merely reinforce the campaign identity already established through the development of campaign canon.
The nature of this crystallization is that it typically has diminishing returns. The first time you pull a fact from complete ignorance, it establishes a lot of constraints on future decisions. Each further abductive “clarification” establishes less and less until you’re no longer adding information about a subject but instead just repeating the information already emanating from the subject. This is related to the idea of Abductive Justification reaching into the past. The farther back you have to reach, the more careful you have to be about touching things already established—they often don’t have enough wiggle room to land where you need them to be to avoid contradiction. This is why you’ll often see one or two big “leaps” of Abductive Justification that end up setting a broad standard or directionality for many things.
As for the question about causal degeneracy, consider the following example: If I go into the grocery store and find that the price of ground beef has increased 40%, and I operate on the “efficient market” presumptions, then I can contemplate potential reasons for this. Perhaps the supply of beef dropped or the demand for energy spiked. In the real world, we can follow up on and investigate these matters with data; for example, if the energy demand spiked, we would see price increases across the board. But either way, presuming we are too ignorant to currently answer that question, we know that many combinations of these causes could result in exactly the same 40% price increase.
In an RPG context, causal degeneracy is special because it gives us the ability to choose or imply a cause that—in the context of our knowledge of campaign canon—seems fitting. Note that this is necessarily simulationist; we are not merely inventing any fact we like but instead demanding that effects are the result of causes.
If reality—in particular the gameworld reality—was simplistic, then each effect or outcome could be traced to a single cause. In this regime, the concept of a Protean stance towards rulings is nonsensical. When the game presents a fact, the cause is clear; there is no decision to make. When the game fails to present a relevant fact, the Protean’s “choice” is false; whatever choice he makes traces directly to a single cause—and we would be able to find the correct choice by identifying the one cause that accords with other known outcomes elsewhere.
However, reality is incredibly complex. Except in isolated environments, each effect has many thousands of causal inputs—and “The Cause” of that effect will be one of innumerable linear combinations of those causal inputs. When a Protean “chooses” an effect in this regime, causal degeneracy guarantees that there are many possible (valid) causes of that specific effect. In other words, because the effect could have resulted from many potential causes, the Protean can choose that effect and remain confident in its justification without needing a further validation process, such as a second-order analysis of the causes.
Thanks again for your interest and readership; I hope that clarifies at least a few of the topics you wondered about.
Thank you for the detailed answer! There is some fertile food for thought there… The problem for me is only that I need to play more to get a feel for it.
One final question would be: Is your aim here solely defining terms as a basis for having productive discussion on this topic? I can see how this shapes and supports some of the BrOSR pillars of play… Or do you see further scope to define the Protean way of play, inferring new ideas & methodologies to try out?
This question arrives to me a bit like "is this development or results?" When we're on the bleeding edge, development is a kind of result too. The second half of this article is what reactions seem to focus on, but I didn't even have it in mind when writing the article; I just wanted the first half. My attempts to broaden my understanding from that work have resulted in some ideas that ring true (and echo what others before have also formulated), and the conclusions I drew are far from obvious and are clearly hitting concepts under contention. Rest assured I will be following this line of thinking further.
My ultimate goal is a conceptual framework where people can discuss every aspect of RPGs without ambiguity. The places that I have ended up are surprising in many ways. The impetus that drives the BrOSR is an elevation of the concept of Truth and a respect for "what works". As long as my formulations seem to point towards the true nature of things, I have no doubt there will be strong alignment and a willingness to keep pushing on these ideas.
Im glad you put pictures in this so us blue collar DMs could understand it.
I'm ready to perform some abductive justifications on injection-derived events, if you know what I mean
From "On Rules and Rulings" onward I will refer to as the second half of this article. It really would have been easier to consume as a separate post. I do like that you point out that the Protean approach (ad-hoc rulings) requires less cognitive effort whereas the Labyrinthine approach (hard rulings that will be carried forward in time as "house rules") requires searching the 'solution space' for an answer that achieves a 'best fit' for the campaign, rule system, and players. This approach is prone to be much harder to sustain and requires discipline and thoughtfulness that is beyond many Referees (sadly). It also might grind an exciting game session to a halt (sacrificing the short-term good for the long-term good).
I don't know that I have any criticisms here. I merely observe that Protean "rulings" have their own limitations (including capriciousness that can drive players to self-eject). Both mechanisms should be in the tool chest for a Referee.
Thanks for attempting to give us the words to describe the hobby. This kind of precision is sorely needed. It is probably worth taking a deeper dive into existing game theory. There may be some hidden gems in that literature (if you can stand the math / logic symbols).
The lackluster state of theoretical development is the entire reason I’m even writing this stuff. It seems like Archon had exactly the same feeling. The nature of RPGs already evades 95% of the analysis assumptions in the field, but most practitioners shove on bullishly through to (wrong) conclusions despite that. To be frank, the stuff that tries to address the unique qualities of RPGs is almost universally poor.
If anyone out there is reading this comment and feels like they have a gotcha for me, my body is ready. I want to read a serious work that doesn’t begin with completely laughable assumptions and/or a framing which specifically prevents them from walking into the rake for the 100th time.
For the first half of the article, I have one question regarding the Tale of Two Campaigns.
"In campaign X, the outcome of player actions could be characterized as the accumulation of unrelated events. In campaign Y, by contrast, the outcome of player actions was the focused development of existing canon.
In BrOSR parlance, the injections in campaign X have resulted in diffusion, while the injections in campaign Y resulted in convergence."
I am wondering if you have any off the cuff thoughts about a proper mixture of both collapsing threads leading to unification of events and convergence versus the value of novel injections that might tend to lead to diffusion but keep the world interesting? 70/30 perhaps? 80/20? 90/10?
To go back to a random wilderness encounter - should the Orcs we just rolled up be from an already known tribe (existing faction) or should these Orcs belong to an entirely new tribe perhaps migrating into the area (novelty)? Sometimes novelty leads to conflict or a shake up in existing factions too. The alien invasion forcing everyone to band together. The Spanish conquistadors causing tribes who had been dominated by the Aztecs to form a new alliance.
A real campaign (even a relatively fresh one) is too complex to hope to write down. These toy examples are provided to demonstrate the structural differences that result from different decisions in the process.
With that out of the way, the concept we’re trying to achieve I might call “Superconvergence.” This is where most every thread in the campaign realigns itself like a magnet toward some event imbued with cosmic urgency. These kinds of events have a way of “ending” a campaign, acting as a soft reset, or fundamentally changing the playing field, marking a distinct line between Pre-Event and Post-Event where the behavior and assumptions are different on both sides.
If we are trying to achieve Superconvergence, then the campaign manager should watch for dead ends. A lot of convergences have a way of “dying” after crawling into a certain corner—their latest resolution is imbued with some finality that makes it seem unfruitful (for a player) to keep them going. But we cannot achieve a Superconvergence without multiple independent convergences.. converging. Thus, the answer to your question is “we need enough loose-end events to invite the possibility of reawakening convergent threads of action”. Forgive the elaborate answer; it is something I haven’t figured out how to articulate yet.
I look forward to you figuring this last part out. Perhaps biology has the answer for you. It strikes me that random mutations are part of the way nature ensures a last "secret doors check" in a dead-end before the final curtain falls. These seem to be vanishingly rare. https://share.gemini.google/TL2CJj4qTPkh
> as the gameworld accumulates campaign canon, it becomes more authoritative than any person involved in its management.
"A government of laws, and not of men."