One Simple Thing

What the hey. We've got a Wiki. I'll archive.

These are the records of the One Simple Thing series of posts. In those posts I tried to use simple words and phrases to get across points of theory that are (to me) important and useful. Was it successful? There's evidence before you, go and judge for yourself.

My Guy

Original posts, and 40 pages of discussion, here.

My Guy: In RPGs you can play a guy (or a girl, or a wombat). This guy is not real. He does not have a brain, or a heart, or courage. You pretend he has these things. He can not make you do things, because you are real, and he is not.

You make this guy, in your mind. So it's cool for you to want him to act one way, and not want him to act some other way. After all, you made him. All you need to say is "I want My Guy to be brave," and your friends will say "Cool!"

But if you say "I can't have My Guy run away, that's not who he is ... I have no choice," then you are wrong. You do have a choice. You could choose to have him run away. Now maybe you really don't want him to run and (see above) that's cool. Maybe if he runs away then you can't have fun playing any more. That would stink. But if you mean "I won't" then you should not say "I can't." That is just not true. Your friends know it is not true, because they are not dumb. If you lie to your friends it pisses them off, even more than they were pissed off in the first place because you would not run away from a great big troll and all their guys got killed dead.

People who disagreed with this post did so by contending that the words "real", "can't" and "lie" were used in arguable ways. Notably:

• Just because something has no physical reality doesn't mean that you can say it's "not real"
• If having your guy run away would, in that action, mean that you are no longer roleplaying then you "can't" have him run away within the context of roleplaying, because doing so takes you out of that context
• Lie can connote intentional deceit, as opposed to just untruth. Even after it was made clear that this was not the intent, argument continued around whether the word should have been used, and whether it was an attack to use it.

Boredom

Original posts, and 9 pages of discussion (does that mean I'm getting better?) here.

Boredom: Some people like one thing, some people like another. When someone gets what they like, it makes them excited. When they get something else it often makes them bored. Even if they get something that someone else would really, really like, it can be boring to them. RPGs are games. We want to avoid the boring bits.

I have heard people say "Well, we have to pay attention to this boring bit in order to get to the fun stuff." They are mistaken. If it's really just boring stuff on the way to your fun then you can skip it, and nobody will mind, because it's boring. Realism, continuity, character integrity, fairness, conflict, challenge and many more things are of this type: they only matter if somebody at the table decides they matter. If they don't matter? Skip them and make more time for exciting stuff.

If your group knows this truth, but still won't skip some part of the game then that tells you something. It tells you that somebody finds it interesting. They may even need that thing in order to get excited. If you find something boring, but somebody else needs it in order to get excited, then at least one of you will be bored most of the time. That is a bad thing. It is also very common when you grab a group of players at random. Maybe it would be better not to grab groups of players at random. If you know what you like, and can say it, then you can find players who like the same thing. Then you can all skip the boring bits together. That is a good thing.

People who disagreed with this post seemed mostly to think that it was too prescriptive (reading "that is a good thing" for "that should be your foremost goal", no matter how much I told them not to). Notably:

• There are circumstances in which you might choose to be bored because it had other redeeming values, like making your friend feel good. Of course.
• Some people argued that there are circumstances in which the boring stuff is required in order to have the exciting stuff be exciting, and therefore it is too limiting to recommend skipping the boring stuff. Having talked with them about it in the thread, I still believe this to be unfounded.

For the most part, however, people simply accepted this one as obviously true, and started talking about how to achieve the communication that lets you know what people are excited about and aim for that.

The Story

Original posts, and 10 pages of discussion, here.

The Story: When people play an RPG they tell a story. Everyone who plays adds something to the story. Unless you have a tape recorder running, that story, as it is told right that second, can only ever be heard if you are there right that second.

When a player talks about the game later she is not doing the same thing she did to tell the story the first time. She is retelling the story. The story she tells is a second story inspired by the first. In retelling the story, she will reveal what she thought was important about the first story. If she thinks that the fights were the important thing then she will tell a second story with all the action and none of the in-between. If she thinks that the way the characters related to each other between the fights was the important thing then she will tell a second story with a lot of talking, and very little fighting. Those are both true retellings of the first story, but neither of them is the first story.

When someone, before the session is played, says that he knows what story the group is going to tell, he is not talking about the first story. He is saying that he could already tell you the second story that he will tell after the session. He is saying that he has control over all the things that he will later find important enough to retell. Or, put another way, he is saying that the things he doesn't have control over will not be important enough to make it into a retelling.

This is not the same as knowing that some elements will appear in the first story. Say I prepare a plot with a dark evil that must be destroyed (or the world ends) buried behind seven doors, and each door can only be opened by passing a certain test in a certain way. Do I know, before playing that game, what the story will be? Only if I would choose, in retelling the story, to talk about that evil, those doors and their tests. If I would choose to talk about the things that the other players had their characters do in response to those tests, and how it brought them together (or drove them apart) as a group, then I don't know anything about the story, going in. The only way I can find out what that story will be is for the other players to tell me.

I honestly don't think anyone disagreed with the spirit of what I was saying here. A whole bunch of people very strongly wanted to talk about what the word "story" meant in this context, and whether I was talking about a literary story, or a journalistic story, or just the sort of story even atoms make when they mate and cling. I didn't want to get into that, said I didn't want to get into that, and then we had a great big furball about whether I was allowed to not want to get into that. Some people argue that the point doesn't hold water apart from the semantics. My position is that it does.