Magical thinking

Doyce quotes some stuff here on RPGs and magic:

… [I am] against taking magic for granted, relying on the system, instead of trying to elicit that which the system is designed to facilitate. Relying on the system has the paradoxical effect of making the magic both more and less real: on the one hand, it removes everything from the realm of concrete action and physical description, distancing everyone from what’s really going on; on the other hand, by invoking rules, one lends an air of authority if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. “I’m using Waters of Vision to try and see what’s going on” implies that the magic is real*; “I’m peering into the water in the bowl on my dresser to see what I can see in the ripples” leaves crucial room for doubt and ambiguity**.
(The paradoxical epistemology of rpgs: precisely because they are so subjective—based almost wholly on the subjective cause-and-effect dialogue between players and referee—they end up being much more objective than the real world.)

… and then footnotes his own comments:

* — “Real”, read “measurable and solid”, which is so antithetical to the idea of what magic is in most settings that it makes Magic into Not-Magic (Technology). Magic in DnD (and in virtually every other RPG out there), for instance, is actually Technology — very reliable technology, come to that.
** — But lends a solidity to the act itself. Compare “I do a Divination of his location.” to the actual concrete actions described in the example above: which one immerses you in the world of the character more? Which allows (or forces) a certain emotional separation from the scene?

Yes.

This is certainly something that happens, I think, any time you apply rules to RPGs — the rules themselves become short-hand for the desired action, and they make the action that much more formulaic and distant.

D&D is certainly like that. Everyone has their books, can look up spells, knows exactly their effects, their duration, what they should or shouldn’t result in, and so forth. They are, indeed, technology — or, perhaps, applied science . Rather than, “I gesture, pray, and summon forth the Flames of the Ruby Dawn to envelope the creature, blinding its eyes and charring its flesh,” we get, “I’m casting a Ruby Dawn spell. That does [rolls] 18 pts of flame damage, and its blinded for 3 rounds, unless it makes a Reflex save.”

Even in a less structured setting, such as Nobilis, or even ADRPG, that’s still going to happen. In Nobilis, we get bogged down in whether something is a Lesser or Greater Creation, how many MPs that will take, how those MPs can be spent, how that counters what value of Auctoritas the foe has, and how many Wounds of what sort might ensue. It becomes mechanical, not lyrical.

On the other hand, it’s a simulation. I can as easily note that the same thing occurs in physical combat, not just magic. It’s not, “I whip my steely blade around, straining mightily to feint, then bring it under his shield and embed it in the gap between his chain shirt and his belt,” but “I rolled … a 15, for … 9 points of damage.” Mechanics.

The problem comes, of course, in trying to be lyrical, be mythic, while still being fair. As a wizard, or a Noble, I, the character, would have a lot more knowledge of what I could do (through training and experience) than I, the player, have. Quantifying stuff — attributes, mechanics — gives me a short-cut to that knowledge.

There’s also a trust/meta-gaming conflict involved. It’s one thing to hear the GM say, “He successfully avoids your swing” and know he has the numbers (more or less) to back it up. It’s another thing to hear it and know he’s merely manipulating the story for the best effect. If my blow didn’t land, why didn’t land? What objective value can I examine and ponder to determine if it’s fair, if it’s right, if my Boo-yah-laden berserker blow really should have been so dismissed.

Regardless, the mechanics can make things … well, mechanical. Prosaic. No longer mythic, as Doyce describes.

He rolls down to two questions:

So, Question the First: How to think mythically? How to encourage the players to think/act mythically? […]
So, Question the Second: How to move from my current mode of “objective-non-immersive” to “subjective-immersive” to let people be engaged in the action, not the rules.

The two are actually linked since, as noted above, it’s difficult to be lyrical and mythical when you’re forced to working through the rules all the time. It’s a left-brain/right-brain conflict, in some ways. Messy.

I think his goal in the second question is laudable, and, if reachable, cuts through both problems:

Ideally, the goal should be that the players are always utterly confident that they did what they say they did, but unsure as to whether the ‘magic’ will behave as expected.

Or combat, or any other attempted action. As in real life, characters (and their playes) should do things (in 99% of the cases) with confidence that it’s the right thing to do, and that it should do what they think it should, and the GM should then be able to adjudicate how variables (known and unknown) affect the outcome. It’s relatively straightforward (which means it’s easy to see, difficult to do). And, as Doyce points out, it’s based on trust in the GM (and in one’s understanding of the world), as well as a willingness to negotiate where there’s a conflict.

What frustrates me about this is that I was DOING this (creating more mythic imagery and veiling the hard rules) at the beginning of the game before I really learned the rules, and I’m doing it less now because I’m thinking of them too much.

And this was assisted by having a set of characters who, for the most part, were amnesiacs. Our characters didn’t know themselves or their capabilities, and the players didn’t know what the heck all those character sheet doodlings meant, either, except in an abstract fashion.

My own character in this, Sian, is perhaps hampered by not being a Mythic character, or seeing herself as such. She sort of rebooted to Prosaic at the beginning of the first episode, and though she’s gotten her memory back, even as a Mythic Embodiment of Punishment, she still tends to think linearly and prosaically. She’s trying to stretch a bit, but she’s now torn between what her duty tells her she ought to be (mythic, in a sense) and using her, ahem, imagination to find out who she is as a human being.

Not that humans can’t be mythic. But to some degree, my character is exacerbating the problem Doyce is having, since she’s fighting that mythic perspective (and since, as a player, I tend to be, big surprise, linear and prosaic). Sian actively avoids the mythic, disliking it because it’s out of her ken and control (mirroring, perhaps, the player’s insecurities).

I’m nattering on at length about this, both because I’m very much aware of the issue within the Nobilis game, and because the overall rules-leaching-the-life-out-of-adventure thang is something I’ve struggled with all too often as well.

Take my Spycraft game. The same sorts of issues apply. I’m not running a one-shot-and-they’re-down cinematic sort of game, but there’s certainly an action-adventure aspect to it — not Bond, but not Smiley, either.

So how do I get folks to do something like, “I dive over and skid to a halt under the table, draw a bead on the top button of Colonel Craig’s dress jacket, and spray him with automatic fire,” rather than, “Okay, I’m crouching here, and shooting him with a … 15 … on full auto, so that’s … 29 points of damage, if it hits.”

On the other hand, it’s not the mechanics itself I object to — I like knowing how well they shot, and what the damage is. It’s when the mechanics are all that is happening.

Or take another case. Interrogation of someone for information. There are certainly mechanics for it … and Spycraft actually has some very good ones … but to use them tends to suck the life out of what should be a very dramatic scene.

On the other hand, simply acting out the interrogation is both lengthy and, ultimately, arbitrary (or arbitrary-seeming) as to when, whether, or how the person breaks or betrays information.

I’ve done it both ways, and both have problems (and benefits).

So maybe the problem is, as a GM, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. Short of a holodeck, that is.

Maybe, as the GM, I need to set the example. If I want some liveliness with my mechanics, I need to model it. Minimize the anvil chorus of generic bad guys generically shooting their generic guns, number, number, number, and instead throw in a little action description with it. Not a lot, because there are only so many hours in the game, but enough to make it a set of people doing intersting things that, perhaps, can be reacted to in the same way.

It’s a thought.