On the Emergent Nature of Story

I'm happy with this. It's something I wrote when I discovered that there were other people who played the old way and I've updated it only very slightly since. It's not a whole mission statement, but it's a part of one.

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, and 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 and 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; and two, he must simulate the opposition to the group by playing the monsters and 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