Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Conflict

...and Expectations
One of the conflicts that may be occurring at your table today might involve the expectations among players and the referee being quite different. A few years ago what I will call "story style games", those with a focus on shared narrative, introduced a change to the power dynamic in some tabletop role playing. Players in story style RPGs are given more say in world creation and in the application of rules as well as some narrative control. Old school games are frequently referred to as "the referee's (insert name) game" because it is the referee who controls all aspects of the game except the player's character who is free to go about interacting with the referee's world using the referee's rules. In such games each referee is expected to be fair and to assist the player in having fun playing in "their world", but control of the world and rules is firmly in the hands of the referee.
Imagine my shock when as an old school gamer I first sat down at a table being run using a "narrativist" style. I asked what some aspect of the world is like and rather than the referee telling me what my character knows about "her world", she turned the question back to me... "What did I think?" she asks in return. I believe I was paralyzed (having failed my intellect saving throw). With the help of other players who were more familiar with this style of play, I began to get the idea that the world was to be shaped collaboratively and that the underlying assumptions of this particular game were very different from anything I had experienced before.
Now imagine the reverse scenario; one where a person accustomed to a more narrative/collaborative game style, in which players are encouraged to freely add to the fiction by introducing aspects of the shared setting that might appeal to them, is now sitting down with an old school referee who expects to be asked what the player's character knows about the world. The referee at this table has a definite idea in mind for how his world works and does not anticipate design suggestions coming from the players during session play. Sounds like a potential conflict between expectations based on dissimilar assumptions.
In game conflict makes for interesting play. Conflict between a player and referee is not so much fun. It is not as simple as labeling some systems narrativist, or others gamest or simulationist. Those are terms which may have merit when talking theoretically about game design, but may have little impact once the dice start rolling. At this point I can run White Box as any of the three styles by altering the way I referee. Pre-communication about the game parameters so that everyone is expecting a similar style of game seems more to the point and therefore more helpful.

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