Ball-obsessed |
From the Referee's Guide from Treasure Hunters Precis Edition. A lot of my ideas have changed in five years but the emergent nature of story remains the same.
All
games have rules & fiction. These do not have to be explicit. In the case
of playing fetch with a dog, you & the dog know the rules even though the
dog has no ability or method to explain them. In chess, the fiction is very
thin. But there are no "real" chess men out there which the pieces
represent, &you are not really "at war" with the other player.
In
a Role-Playing Game specifically, players take turns gathering information
& using that information to manage resources to transform scarce turns into
other scarce game resources. While situationally-oppositional, players
generally work together to achieve goals that are marginally greater than they
could achieve individually. For
instance, players may bargain in splitting up the exposure to danger or the
rewards gained.
The
reward for this behavior is three-fold: in-game resources such as the gold
piece; an expansion of the ability to manage resources through character growth
(XP & levels), and finally a sense of wellbeing &camaraderie gained
through collective success. The first
two rewards are game rewards; the latter one is a table reward. All game rewards are ultimately subordinate
to table rewards, or else players will cease to return to the table.
One
player, the Referee, is set apart from the others by virtue of two
distinctions: one, asymmetrical
information that the other players have not got; & two, he must simulate
the opposition to the group by playing the monsters & describing the
effects of traps, &c.
This
distinction-- the simulation of opposition rather than actual opposition-- is
important. It informs the participants that the Referee is not actually an
opponent to the rest, but part of the team of players. Again, while there is
situational opposition, the goal of the Referee is to experience the collective
camaraderie of the team of players and not to thwart it even if the pieces he controls
do thwart certain player actions!
Inasmuch
as the Referee maintains this juxtaposition of both opposition &
facilitation in his mind, the players (including him) will have a better go at
the common table rewards they seek.
This
is not an easy concept for the uninitiated; indeed, some Referees shall
struggle mightily with their understanding and application of this
juxtaposition.
Let
us examine how this role-within-a-role and game-within-a-game that the Referee
plays came to be.
In
the beginning, there were war-games.
Battles were re-enacted and the use of randomizers (dice) stood in for
the Fog of War, as it were. Tables,
based upon real-world physics of machines of war and the real training levels
of real soldiers, served as indicia of outcomes. The men (and they were exclusively men) who
played these war-games were military commanders. They did not play for enjoyment or the thrill
of competition, but as a teaching tool in order to prepare these men to lead
real battles. But these tables were
incomplete; a Judge was necessary to adjudicate what flat and lifeless numbers
could not.
The
pieces—little men and tokens—were absolutely representative of actual men and
actual machines. The maps they used were
absolutely representative as well. These
were no “fictional” wargames in the sense of Chess. The rules were explicit, unlike playing fetch
with a dog. In fact, it is hard to say
whether these original war-games were games at all. The object was teaching exclusively. The simulation allowed iteration at a
reasonable cost in money and time rather than any extrinsic enjoyment. Certainly the rewards gained were far-away in
an intellectual sense from those rewards that we think of when we think of
“games” today.
In
time, some war-game historians and enthusiasts (the earliest we know of is H.G.
Welles) divorced this teaching tool from its purpose, and re-purposed it for
play. Rather later, war-games enthusiasts made another intellectual leap: if war-games were no longer about teaching
history and stratagems in real wars, then do they need to feature real wars at
all? They did not! Further, do these war-games necessarily have
to feature Man & Machine as they really exist, or shall they rather be
allowed to simulate any sort of fantastic creature or device? This leap of the imagination brought us to
the shores of a whole new kind of pass-time.
And
from this leap came the idea of the fantasy Hero leading a unit of Men and
others in battle. Eventually, some of
the war-gamers rather fancied leaving the armies on the battlefield, and
concentrating entirely on the Heroes themselves.
These
Heroes walked off the game board, delved into an ancient dungeon, and the rest
is history.
So
the Famous Game came to be; & so the Referee became not only an impartial
judge of the action, but also simultaneously another equal player at the table.
How the Sausage Gets
Made
Story
is the goal of playing the game in its entirety; it is not the point of the
rules themselves. Without the proper inputs, no set of rules will produce a
suitable story.
Story
emerges thusly:
The
game world exists, brought into imaginary life by you, the Referee. It is
largely independent of the Heroes; it is a thing unto itself until the Heroes
begin to inhabit it.
Heroes
act upon the game world. Character
actions are based on character motivations.
Character motivations change and grow, both in terms of what's going on
in the game, and what's going on at (or away from) the table.
Thus
far the division of creative labor in the making of the Story has fallen more
or less evenly between the players of the Heroes and the Referee. The Referee often puts in much more labor to
create his part beforehand, while the players take up the lead during table
time.
This
is a process by which the players become entangled in some deep and inscrutable
way with one another and a set of premises: there exists a Hero, he lives in
this place, these are the events happening, &c; which you feed into a black
box called "The Rules." The
rules spit out a different animus, and again, the entangled player-gestalt
makes sense of the new animus.
The
sense they make is "The Story."
When
the machine works well, players feel like it is magic. When it works poorly,
players will seek to place blame- or even disengage from the process and shut
that machine down.
As
the referee, one job you have is to keep the black box functioning properly at
the table, while the proverbial sausage is being
made. You must know what subset the rules which you wish to use and where to
find them (or have them in your mental catalogue.). You must make or be
prepared to make rules which bridge gaps un-foreseen by this set of rules (i.e.
create house rules). You must jump into
the breach instantly with your virtual tool-box and make rulings in real time
when gears grind and sprockets spring.
And spring they will, at junctures shrouded from prognostication.
This
aspect of the referee is essential to the creation of story. This is your Role, and this guide will help
you be ready to play it.
Scott Anderson
Seekonk, Massachusetts
20 May 2014
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