Design Thoughts: Know Your Place 1

Let me get this out of the way first, because like the oppressive noise I make while assaulting a plate of hot wings, there's no avoiding it. This post is going to at points be so far up its own ass that I'll qualify as a proctologist. I'm going to be so academic that all the sex I've ever had will un-happen, a process that promises to be just as confusing for my former partners as the initial act was. Probably, there will be less crying this time. Possibly more, though. I'm super emotionally fragile these days.

But these thoughts to follow have been rattling around in my noggin like the squirrel bones in my car's engine block and, like the squirrel bones, I really need to get them out.

Role With Me On This

I'm sure there are people far smarter and less having-had-sex than I am who have tackled how we parse the roles of player and facilitator in RPGs. You should go find them and read them. I won't link them here because reading is for nerds and as we've established I'm a prolific sex-haver.

"Yeah, I know where a cliborus is, duh."

In any case let's look at some examples of how some notable RPGs proffer the role of player and facilitator; what they do, should do, etc.

Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition, on "The Role of the Players":

Once completed, your character serves as your representative in the game.

On "The Role of the Dungeon Master": 

The DM is in charge of the adventure, which appears in the adventure book, while the characters navigate the adventure’s hazards and decide where to explore. [...] The DM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what the characters experience.

If you look at the Player's Handbook, you get (pg. 5) that a DM "describes the environment", "narrates the results". Players "describe what they want to do". I could do a whole post about the language of negotiation in D&D. 

If we look at Blades in the Dark, we get something a little different.

On "The Players" (pg. 2). Note that the bolding is not mine, that's in the book. John Harper wanted this to stand out.

This is the players’ core responsibility: they engage with the premise of the game, seeking out interesting opportunities for crime in the haunted city—taking big risks against powerful foes and sending their characters into danger.

On "The Gamemaster" (pg. 3)

The GM establish the dynamic world around the characters, [...] The GM plays all the non-player characters [...] The GM helps organize the conversation of the game so it's pointed toward the interesting elements of play.

I didn't choose those games arbitrarily. For better or worse, D&D is a mass large enough to have its own gravity within the RPG ecosystem; I don't think it's controversial to suggest many will enter the hobby here by mere virtue of its reach. And so, one might proffer that there are vast swathes of gamers who have internalized D&D's roles. The character are representative, advocating for their ambitions (mechanical, narrative, thematic, etc.) beneath the DM (who is "in charge", "determines the results").

"The enemy wizard casts Acid Orb, how do you plead?"

 And Blades in the Dark is a popular non-D&D RPG that is at least large/influential enough to have spawned its own ecosystem (and even a TV show). More importantly, its design came explicitly out of an interrogation of the power dynamics/narrative negotiations which are at D&D's bones. To quote Harper in February 2012 (five years before BitD was published):

"I wonder if it makes sense to look at the process you're currently using (your creative agenda, rulings, constitution, player/GM roles) as the game qua game. That is, there is no formal final state as a goal, but rather the functional implementation of this method and its evolution serves as "the game." I can certainly imagine a rules text that laid out the methodology as you're presenting it here, along with examples of rulings to form a baseline toolkit. That would be a complete game, IMO, and probably far more useful as a teaching text than the presentation of the final rules set when it's "finished."

There are plenty of ways to organize RPG design theory, and here I'm putting D&D at one end and Blades in the Dark on the other. One negotiates from a place of hierarchical authority (at its worst, 'mother-may-I'), while the other negotiates from a place more akin to Lev Vygotsky's pedagogical work (with the GM as a "more knowledgeable other" organizing the fiction-conversation, rather than strictly leading it).

To be honest, a child psychologist seems really apt to understanding RPG players.

I'm actually going to resist the urge to keep blathering; this is the third draft of this post and it feels only halfway done.

Keep on the lookout for part 2!