This will be long.
Why?
It has a lot of characters.
That's pretty much the only reason. If it was just Violet, it'd be over already!
And yes, it did used to have a different title. Two, actually, and I'm not super-happy with this one. But it's the best one I've got that isn't a spoiler. ^_^
Rebecca
Hello!
Commentary goes here.
Do you think it is sufficiently clear that this is focusing more on part of my project than on the whole book (including the other parts of my work and the other authors' work?)
Do you think I'm barking up the right tree or the wrong tree when thinking about formal language for this stuff?
I'm kind of thinking of bugging some epistemologists for a good starting place, since building a language from scratch in computer scientist mode might be duplicating effort.
Also, please note any obvious errors ASAP, whether in the HTML translation (missing paragraphs) or in the main text. Thanks!
Rebecca
Abstract. The fictional worlds (settings) created for roleplaying games are unusually subjective entities. The setting in which one group plays is not the setting in which another group plays. The player group has substantial prerogative in standard play to rewrite and expand the setting. More importantly, the player group determines which portions of the game setting and rules are meaningful and to what degree.
It is standard for players to extrapolate connections between small details in the provided world. This creates new content that they consider implicit. Other groups may possess a fundamentally different understanding of the setting that is consistent to a similar degree with the material the game provides.
In effect, roleplaying games in their static published form do not describe a single fictional world and story but rather a large multi-dimensional space of fictional worlds and stories organized by unifying elements of structure. In every fictional world based on the canonical Exalted setting, the Scarlet Empress disappeared in Realm Year 763, five years before the story begins. This is a constraint that unifies all such worlds, but it is not a specific fictional event: there exist valid instantiations of the Exalted setting in which she was kidnapped by demons and in which she retreated, voluntarily, to the Heavenly City of Yu-Shan.
Exalted: the Fair Folk describes a world in which, quite literally, anything can happen. This is the Wyld, a primal Ginnungagap of myth beyond the edges of the world in the Exalted game setting. It is a place with no fixed rules where chaos gives rise to fragments of stories and events.
In defining the Wyld Exalted: the Fair Folk cannot organize the space of stories it helps tell around the myth of a standard fictional world. The game rules and setting cannot provide meaning or detail. They can only provide structure.
This paper examines the construction of a roleplaying game setting as a way of providing structural support for the players' gaming. It uses the design constraints and decisions of Exalted: the Fair Folk as examples of the difficulties and possibilities involved. In this perspective, each rule and datum in a roleplaying game is a tradeoff between lost possibility---the stories you can no longer tell---and structure, which facilitates telling the stories that remain.
1. Introduction
In an RPG, players construct a story that takes place in an imaginary world. The purpose of game material is to assist in this construction. Analyzing the construction of roleplaying games therefore requires understanding what it means to create a story and of the benefits that a roleplaying game offers to this process.
In section 2, this paper proposes one model for evaluating a roleplaying game. The story the players tell is the outcome of a computation performed on the space of possible stories. Games are beneficial if the structure provided allows the players to take the "right" length of time computing a satisfying series of events.
In section 3, this paper discusses the Exalted: the Fair Folk project.
Exalted: the Fair Folk was a collaborative project with chapters divided among multiple writers. In practice, these chapters required different approaches and had different design constraints. This paper focuses exclusively on relevant sections of the author's own contribution, the low-level structure of the Wyld.
In sections 4 through 6, this paper discusses the inherent structure of a roleplaying game session and the stories that the players tell. It explains how Exalted: the Fair Folk uses this structure to facilitate play.
In section 7, the author presents a short summary, conclusions, and directions for future work.
2. The Model
Consider a typical situation in Exalted: three characters, having recently arrived in the capital city of a corrupt principality, set out to reform or destroy it.
The events of the story are undefined until the characters experience them in play. They could topple the Prince from his throne or save him from wicked ministers who have led him astray. They could seize command of the principality's army to defend against an as-yet-unknown threat, or encounter an old nemesis working behind the throne and have that enemy driven them from the region.
Before the game begins there is a large space of possible stories defined by the initial premise. During the process of gaming the players progressively reduce the space of possible stories down to a single story---one set of things "happened," while all other sets did not.
"Fun" and "satisfaction" are byproducts of this computation. This model treats them as a function of time and work---we assume that players receive maximum fun and satisfaction when the amount of time and work spent on any given part of the story is close to some optimum defined by the players' interests.
Other sources of fun and satisfaction---gaming material that inspires the players, game books that are good reads, and so forth---are not dealt with here.
2.1 Structure and Meaning
Every time the players agree on something---implicitly or explicitly---regarding the story, that provides structure. For example, when the players agree to set their game in Germany but to make up the various locales and characters rather than researching them, this imposes structure on the story.
When there is sufficient structure for the players to answer a specific question regarding the imaginary world, that creates meaning. For example, when the players conclude that Mayor Franz of their characters' home town is corrupt, Franz's corruption is a shared meaning that emerges from the game. If one player decides that Franz is nevertheless worthy of trust, his integrity is a personal meaning for that player that emerges from the game.
Meaning is a form of structure, but the converse is not true. If the players agree to play for exactly an hour, as in Puppetland, this imposes massive structural constraints on their game but has no specific meaning in play. It does not define any single detail of the setting or story, although it influences how each develops.
Structure in a game restricts the field of possible stories and limits the set of potentially emergent meanings. Stories are most structured after they are told.
2.2 Gaming
This paper views gaming as a computational process.
Gaming is work, in the sense of effort over time. That work takes the form of processing the raw data---the set of possible stories. The players generate additional structure until a single story and meaning set remains.
2.3 Game Material
The rules and setting for a game facilitate play by generating some of this structure in advance.
In classic Cops & Robbers, it is traditionally difficult to determine whether one character has successfully shot another. The "nuh unh" factor1 obstructs simple methods of resolution. In many modern roleplaying games, it is equally difficult to determine whether one character's argument successfully convinces another; there is a similar "nuh unh" factor at work.
Exalted provides rules for combat and social situations. These allow impartial arbitration of a character's success. Numeric character traits determine the base probability of success and dice rolls collapse that probability in practice. If the players can use these rules without contradicting their own ideas of genre, the rules structure the development of the story. They facilitate play because deciding between the stories of a character's success and the stories of a character's failure is quicker and less stressful.
In a similar fashion, descriptions of regions, people, cultures, and other setting details do some of a game's storytelling work in advance.
1 People saying "nuh unh!" when shot.
2.4 Genre and Play Contract
The players' ideas regarding the game and its genre also provide structure.
In a game of Exalted, players generally commit to playing characters in an epic swords and sorcery saga. What this actually says about the story depends on the individual players in question, but it always says something, and it helps decide which way the story goes.
In a similar fashion players can facilitate play by making rules regarding how they'll play the game. They may define one player as the Storyteller, whose authority on most game events is final, or decide aspects of the story they want to tell before play begins.
2.5 How Good Games Go Bad
There is a certain "natural length" for a set of events in a roleplaying game. This is the time frame that maximizes the players' fun and satisfaction.
If the game has too much structure, events will proceed too quickly. For example, if a player is interested in the resolution of an epic long-term conflict, and the game rules suggest resolving it with a single Long-Term Conflict roll, the player might not have fun.
If the game has too little structure, players have to spend large amounts of time resolving questions and events that don't interest them. For example, in games like Cops & Robbers, arguing over whether a robber was successfully shot is not necessarily fun for all players involved.
In practice, most games have a tiered resolution system. The amount of structure scales up or down depending on how much time the players want to spend. Exalted is one of a large class of games where the impact of a single roll varies, and the number of situations played strictly by the book varies, based on the player group's tastes.
In games like this, where the amount of structure is scalable, there are two common failure modes for the game.
In the first failure mode, something happens that the game can't provide scalable structure for. In a game of Dungeons and Dragons modeled on Much Ado About Nothing, the rules are almost no help. They do not speak to the matter of who finds love with whom, or when. Similarly, in Exalted, the game provides no information on how to permanently destroy the settings' most dangerous antagonists. To matchmake in Dungeons and Dragons, or kill a Deathlord in Exalted, the player group must have a strong and shared vision of the relevant genre. If they do, or if they want to spend a long time hashing out the relevant issues, there's no problem. If they don't, the necessary structure isn't present, and figuring out what happens takes too long.
In the second failure mode, the structure in the game contradicts itself. The available data actually eliminates all the possible stories. This is most common when the rules demand one resolution and the players' expectations demand another---e.g., the rules make it clear that an antagonist can kill all the protagonists and that isn't the story that the players want to tell.
3. The Project
Exalted: the Fair Folk is set in the void beyond the world.
This void is called the Wyld. It is a mystery. It is outside the world, outside traditional rules. It is not bound by the laws we know.
In the broader narrative of Exalted, stories of the Wyld are stories about impossible, indescribable places and things beyond the boundaries of the known. More importantly, they are stories about how more ordinary characters deal with those things. For this reason, the Wyld is "about" exploration, and spirituality, and mystery, and limitless possibility, and hope, and the recognition that people never know quite as much as they think they do.
Exalted: the Fair Folk is a game set in the same place as all the things you can't quite make out in the corner of your eye. It's about that place where words on the tip of your tongue live, where the ideas you'll have tomorrow come from. It's about knowing that no matter how much you know about the world, something could come from outside that world tomorrow and change everything.
3.1 Challenges
In Exalted: the Fair Folk, anything can happen, and almost everything does. This puts the game at large natural risk for each of the two failure modes.
To avoid the first failure mode, the game must provide significant structure for any describable event. If, for example, zombie philosophers burst from the soil and deconstruct the characters' worldview---hoping, no doubt, to devour their dazed victims' brains---the game's rules must handle these events smoothly.
To avoid the second failure mode, the game's structure must not conflict with the player group's expectations for how such an event plays out, even though the game cannot isolate those expectations before publication. Some player groups may think of zombies as unstoppable horrors; others as the grist for dark comedy. The game's model for the zombies must support the appropriate outcome in either case.
3.2 Approach
The approach taken in Exalted: the Fair Folk is to model in the setting the mechanisms by which the player group determines the story. The low-level physics provided for the Wyld focus on providing layers of additional structure to support the story telling process instead of providing meaning or data in advance.
4. Something from Nothing
In a session of Exalted: the Fair Folk, the players play out the story of events in an indescribable world---a world which is functionally a mystery, still a magical thing outside the normal bounds of reality and comprehension, even after a session of play.
To do this, players need a base assumption set about the world that allows sessions of play to occur.
These are the assumptions that Exalted: the Fair Folk assumes that the players will probably want to make:
For the purpose of play
Setting constraints
These tenets are the building blocks for an Exalted: the Fair Folk setting.
To facilitate player agreement on these tenets, seven of them are listed explicitly in the book and the existence of other tenets is noted.
In addition, to give them more structural depth, these tenets are recognized explicitly as key concepts and assigned a large number of connotative qualities. The premise here is that a working vocabulary facilitates the construction of a mental model for the world. It helps determine which questions are worth asking, so that players can derive meaning from the answers. This technique is used repeatedly in Exalted: the Fair Folk.
Specifically, the tenets are described as shinma. They are anthropomorphized as beings, terrible god-monsters from whom the tenets' existence flows.
One such shinma is Nirguna. The term is a Hindu word meaning "without attributes." Nirguna defines existence. Through Nirguna, things exist. Insofar as things fail to exist, this is a failing or Nirguna.
Nirguna is also described as "the nothing and everything dream, the raw beating heart at the core of the Wyld." It has aspects such as "Namadiksha, the gift of names" and "Neti Neti." The first refers to the ceremony by which parents name a child. The second means "not this, not that," and is a Upanisadic formula indicating through negation the undefinable nature of the universe.
Nirguna is written to keep players from worrying about why there is a "something" to exist in the Wyld at all. If they do not care, they may shrug and say, "Nirguna." If they do care, the list of connotative meanings is a springboard for exploration of these matters.
2 This is a structural decision made by the line developer, not an intrinsic characteristic of places beyond the known.
5. Context
Having established the existence of a world it is useful to delimit the context of play. For the purposes of this paper, this refers to time and space.
Distance in the Wyld is mutable. The Wyld is inherently unmappable. This means that the book cannot provide a simple comprehensive atlas for the characters' travels. Tactical movement is also complicated---it may in one story be reasonable to measure each step carefully and in another to travel in one jump from an earthbound plains to the distant sun.
However, the context of the Wyld is not entirely unapproachable. In telling a story that involves distance or time, the players must assign each event in the game world a rough time and place. Only the times and places where events happen are relevant to the story. These times and places are distinct only to the extent that the story differentiates between them. In short, distance and time exist only insofar as the players have information about them.
This frees Exalted: the Fair Folk to organize the spatial context into waypoints and journeys. Each waypoint is a place in which events happen. Characters can travel between the waypoints, taking journeys, but no real details are known. In short, unaccounted-for time during travel is spent on a journey, where the only meaning is that travel happened. Everything else happens in a waypoint.
This structure imposes no additional constraints on the Wyld itself. Waypoints can move in the Wyld and their physical size varies. At the same time, the waypoint structure creates a loose grid-like system for the Wyld that allows the players to think about questions of distance.
Similarly, Exalted: the Fair Folk organizes time in terms of scenes and stories. During scenes, events happen, with "downtime" between them. These scenes group naturally to form stories, delimiting a meaningful series of events.
6. Game Structure
Having defined the Wyld as a waypoint space abiding by certain tenets, the players need the following additional information to proceed to creating the story:
6.1 Methodology
The method for shaping events in the Wyld is in-character action. Each player takes on the role of a character who is an agent of change in the void beyond the world.
Exalted: the Fair Folk defines its principal characters, the raksha or Fair Folk, to have the following key characteristics:
In theory, the latter two measures are subjective. Therefore, one can model any system dynamic enough for a player-defined story as containing characters of this sort---if necessary, by anthropomorphizing the actions of inanimate processes such as storms, destiny, and fire.
In practice, the raksha are not the perfectly abstract templates for action presented here, as other design constraints recommended against making the characters true ciphers.
6.2 Motivation
In order to have a game, the raksha must prefer some events over others.
This is a weak point in the Exalted: the Fair Folk rules. The set of motivations chosen is not an "ideal and minimal" set taken from the study of narrative, psychology, or game theory. Instead, the rules model four specific tactical rewards:
In general, players are driven to the tactical behavior that a system rewards. They also have a drive to tell the "correct" story. The game cannot predict the players' concept of a correct story. Thus, to keep these two drives from conflicting, Exalted: the Fair Folk must separate tactical rewards from game events. The connections between the events in play and the tactical actions taken by the raksha are almost entirely descriptive. The only solid connection is that shaping "appropriate" events, that is, events that fit the descriptive templates provided, gives a bonus towards success on the tactical action. Thus raksha seeking to earn one of the tactical rewards are drawn to a set of story types appropriate to the tactical reward.
6.3 Dispute Resolution
Exalted: the Fair Folk uses an turn-based system for shaping reality.
This is a standard approach to resolving large-scale conflicts in roleplaying games. Since it is difficult to reach consensus if the players all talk at once, their individual contributions to a conflict are studied in order, organized and sequenced by the game's initiative system---its rules for breaking larger goals into atomic actions, which the players take in sequence.
In practice, this seems to work well for Exalted: the Fair Folk but could benefit from a shift in focus. The rules on shaping reality assume that each raksha is telling a story of their own, and these stories interweave to form the larger whole. However, this makes the events of the game dependent on which raksha is shaping them at any given time. Future versions of Exalted: the Fair Folk would benefit from treating each raksha's contribution as something closer to the corresponding player's contribution---"story elements" or "narrative threads" or other things that rise temporarily to prominence within a larger story framework.
6.4 Integration with Creation
Exalted comes with an existing universe---Creation, the world shaped by the Primordials and inhabited by humans, spirits, and the eponymous Exalted. This is a highly structured world about which much is known. Creation and the Wyld regularly interact---not directly, but through the raksha visiting Creation or the people of Creation visiting the Wyld.
Previous material about Creation and Creation-Wyld interactions suggest that Creation is "more real" than the Wyld and its powerful figures "more powerful" than the raksha, but that the raksha were powerful enough to pose a threat to the world. In short, the rakshas' ability to overwrite reality should be a notable edge when facing Creation opposition but not the overwhelming advantage that "the ability to overwrite reality" suggests.
To translate the effects of the rakshas' shaping into Creation terms, Exalted: the Fair Folk provides a palette of "naked" mechanical effects. "Naked" effects are game mechanics that have a meaning in the world but for which that meaning is not provided---such as the rules for magic in Sorcerer, where the same rules apply whether one's power comes from inner demons, hermetic magic, or selling out to one's corporate masters.
Specifically, when mortals find themselves opposing a rakshas' shaped reality, they suffer penalties to their dice pools (their probabilistic chances of success) and a reduction in Willpower---not the real-world concept of determination and skill but a system trait that shares some of its qualities. The events that cause these penalties, and what they mean at the time, are not specified. They are simply structure that helps measure the overall impact of the rakshas' shaping.
Currrent feedback suggests that providing structure with the connotative meanings of existing mechanics (dice pools and Willpower) is not as useful to players as creating setting-based connotation such as the shinma. Players are more likely to look for an existing, defined meaning for game mechanics and more willing to impose their own meanings on setting material.
7. Conclusions
Exalted: the Fair Folk attempts to model in its Wyld the meaning of "this is a world in which sessions of a roleplaying game take place." This concept turns out to have substantial intrinsic and explicit meaning that a game can exploit to facilitate play. In creating a structure to support these meanings, Exalted: the Fair Folk replaces an essentially unplayable premise---"you are entities in a place where anything can happen, and nothing means anything"---with a game of competitive storytelling that players describe as difficult to fully wrap their heads around but rewarding to play.
The underlying structure of a roleplaying game session is driven by issues of information theory and epistemology, that is to say, what is actually known regarding the game world at any given time. It is therefore the author's judgment that it is possible to go significantly further in identifying this structure and developing a formal language for the structures and constraints provided by typical gaming systems. This would facilitate more efficient roleplaying game design.