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    Theory 101: System and the Shared Imagined Space

*By M. Joseph Young*

Not very long ago on a list I frequent, someone teased that they were a

freeformer and as such did not use any system at all. I rather boldly

responded, explaining in some detail what system is and does, and why

freeform uses as much system as any other game, whether /Theatrix/ or

/Fudge/ or /Rolemaster/. Someone else posted to the list, saying that my

explanation of how role playing games work was rather depressing to him,

and took a lot of the fun out of it.

I'd never thought of that. Some people really don't want to know what

makes role playing games work; they just want to play and have fun. It's

like seeing what happens behind the curtain. Not everyone wants to know

how the magician does his tricks.

I can see that, to some degree. /Clash of the Titans/ is a wondrous

adventure to someone who has no idea how it was done. Understanding Ray

Harryhausen's use of stop-action miniatures may be fascinating for some

of us, but it does take something out of the awe of watching the movie

to see not the massive Gorgon rising from the deep but a twelve inch

model superimposed into the scene. In the same way, some people love

looking under the hood, as it were, of the games we play, understanding

what they do and how they do it, while others just want to go for a

ride. If you wanted to /make/ a movie, you would probably need to

understand how such things are made; if you just want to enjoy watching

one, it might be more fun to see the finished product without knowing

how it was achieved. So too understanding how games work in fundamental

ways may interfere with the fun of playing them for some people, but

it's absolutely essential to knowing how to design them.

If you don't want to know how role playing games really work, it's time

to stop reading. There is absolutely no shame in not wanting to know the

theory, of wanting to watch the magician saw the woman in half with no

idea how the illusion works. We'll be looking behind the curtain at how

these things are done, and why they work the way they do. If that

interests you, read on.

At the moment, a great deal of the most valuable role playing game

theory is being done through an Internet web site forum called The Forge

<http://www.indie-rpgs.com/>.Game designers there are building on the

work of others, and theorists elsewhere such as northern Europe's Turku

school of LARP designers <http://users.utu.fi/mijupo/turku/> have found

their way there to participate in those discussions.The theoretical work

is driven by the belief that better understanding of the theory will

produce better games.Most of what is going to be presented in this

series originated there or was expanded there.

The concept that has emerged as possibly the single unifying and

distinguishing feature of role playing games is that of the *Shared

Imagined Space*. In essence, any group of players is making an effort to

imagine the same events occurring in the same imagined setting. Of

course, there are some discrepancies between individual images of this,

but overall the game is able to proceed because there is a common

understanding of what is happening, a shared agreement of the events of

the game.

Sometimes people challenge whether this shared imagined space actually

exists. The easiest way to see that it is so is to consider what it

would be like otherwise. Suddenly Bob's character is trying to out-draw

Dead-Eye-Dan in the streets of Laredo while Ann is piloting her

spaceship through the asteroid field and calling on Bob to target the

pursuing enemy, while Jim sees them all attacking a dragon. While that

starts to sound a bit like playing /Multiverser/, the fact is that even

in that game there is a shared imagined space, an agreed set of events

and setting elements and character actions which interact, although

frequently on multiple stages. If we do not have that agreement, then we

are not really playing together.

How we come to that agreement is the heart of the concept of *system*.

Vincent Baker <http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/lumpley.html>,

author of such innovative games as /Kill Puppies for Satan/, /Dogs in

the Vineyard/, /Animals at Night/, and /Matchmaker/, is credited with

first recognizing and stating what has become known as the *Lumpley

Principle*: System is the means by which any group of players comes to

agreement concerning the content of the shared imagined space.

This principle is the reason freeform and Rolemaster ultimately have the

same "amount" of system. In play, someone at the table makes a

statement, system is then applied by the minds of the participants, and

a consensus is reached as to how this has changed the content of what is

being imagined. How it does that is different in the details with a

mechanically complicated game such as Rolemaster as compared with a

completely socially driven freeform game (a different kind of

complexity), but in the essentials they are the same.

What system does, fundamentally, is apportion *credibility*. That is, it

provides the participants with the means necessary to gauge who has the

right to make what statements about the shared imagined space, and who

does not.

For example, in traditional games, those participants we tend to call

the players (or the "character players" for the sake of clarity) have

the credibility to say what actions their characters are taking and what

words they say. The one player responsible for "everything else", whom

we will here call the referee but who has many names in many games, has

the credibility to determine the success or failure of such actions and

the consequences, the actions of antagonists and adversaries, and the

general shape and situation in the world. We call this credibility

because we all agree to believe statements made by these participants

when those statements are within the extent of their credibility. We

believe that what a player says about his character is true within the

image we share, and that what the referee says about everything else is

true. These are thus credible statements. Although there are exceptions

even in traditional games, the limits on credibility usually follow

these lines rather closely. A player could not say, "Suddenly I see a

door to the right I had not previously noticed, and finding it unlocked

rush through it to safety." Similarly, a referee could not normally say,

"Your character draws his sword and rushes forward to attack the huge

ancient red dragon." A player character who announced the presence of a

door would in most games be ignored, as he does not have the credibility

to insert such doors in the shared imagined world. Sometimes a referee

can get away with statements of player character actions, but the

players will expect that there is a good reason why under this

circumstance the referee is claiming the credibility to make such a

statement, and in many groups the statement will be openly challenged

for that explanation.

Once this is understood, it becomes possible to change the way

credibility is apportioned.For example, /Universalis

<http://ramshead.indie-rpgs.com/>/ eliminates the referee entirely and

instead provides a resource system through which players bid for control

of what happens.Numerous other independent games allow players to create

problems for themselves and for each other.

As part of this, it has become clear that the referee is one of the

players. His role in the game is different from the others, but it is a

role that can be defined by the game rules in many different ways.

Changing what the referee does, distributing aspects of that credibility

in different ways, has led to many challenging ideas in game design. We

also see that game play is an essentially social activity, built

entirely on defining the relationships between the members of the group

such that they know what to believe of what the others say and what they

are entitled to say themselves. Thus a role playing game system is a set

of specific modifications to the social contract of a group of friends,

a sort of ritual in which they engage that has the specific function of

creating this object of shared imagination. It is a means of relating to

each other toward that end.

In attempting to categorize different ways of distributing credibility,

Ron Edwards <http://www.adept-press.com/> has put forward the concept of

*Stance*.The author of many games of which /Sorcerer/, /Trollbabe/, and

/Elfs/ are the best known, Professor Edwards received the Diana Jones

Award <http://www.dianajonesaward.org/> for his contributions to game

design.Stance refers to the relationship between a player, his

character, and the rest of the shared imagined space, and provides

general categories within which specifics may vary from game to game or

group to group.The four major stances are Pawn, Actor, Author, and

Director.

Pawn stance is rather simple to understand. The character is a token

used by the player to act within the game world. Like a /Monopoly/ or

/Parchessi/ piece, no one cares whether the actions of the character

make sense. What matters is that the character does what the player

wants within the world.

Actor stance approaches the world solely through the character, but also

solely through the character's perceived desires and personality. This

is the approach to play in which much depends on what the player

believes the character would "really" do, if he were a real person in

that situation, and is closely associated with the concepts most people

call immersion. Actor stance springs from the perceptions and thoughts

attributed to the character, and limits the player's credibility to

control over that character and the impact that character can

realistically have in the world.

Author stance is in some ways a complicated fusion between Actor and

Pawn. In this case, the player is still controlling the character only;

however, the player is permitted and even expected to use his own

knowledge and desires in making character decisions, while at the same

time providing justification after the fact for why this is what the

character would have done. For example, we have the brash uncouth

fighter who is always getting in brawls, but suddenly the player decides

that he wants play to move toward an alliance between the fighter and a

particular non-player nobleman, so when they meet he chooses not to

fight even though everyone expected him to do so. He justifies this by

stating that his character was for once impressed by someone of noble

bearing, or that the character was suddenly smitten by the Duke's lovely

daughter and so out of character at that moment. What matters here is

that the player is allowing his own knowledge and desires control the

direction the story takes, but is doing so by controlling his character

and creating reasons for the character to have done what the player

wished. It is thus like Actor stance to the degree that the player

controls only his character and does so in a way that preserves

character integrity, but like Pawn stance in that the player uses the

character to accomplish player goals, not character goals, to the degree

that these differ.

Director stance is fairly simple to understand but shocking to accept by

most players. It means that the character players have credibility to

create bits in the shared imagined space that are outside the control of

their characters. In essence, it gives a great deal of credibility

traditionally reserved for the referee to the other players. Yet it is

something that nearly all role players have used to some degree.

Imagine for a moment that a player character has just entered a room.

The referee states that it looks like a woman's bedroom. The player then

says that his character will move to the dresser and examine the

knick-knacks on it. Note that the referee never stated there was a

dresser, or that there was anything on it; the player made the

assumption that a woman's bedroom would have a dresser, and that a

woman's dresser would have something sitting atop it that was

decorative. He then made the assertion incidentally that such things

existed, and requested more information about them. That is a very

limited example of director stance. The majority of games would extend

sufficient credibility to the player to make such statements. If the

player did not have that much credibility, he would have to ask whether

there was a dresser, whether there was anything on the dresser, and

possibly whether there was anything preventing him from moving to the

dresser to get a better look, in each case awaiting confirmation by the

referee, who is the only person with the credibility to place such

objects in the shared imagined space. Going the other direction, a

player with more credibility might state that he was opening the top

drawer, rifling through the lady's undergarments, and finding a wrapped

packet of correspondence that looked like it might be love letters,

which he pockets for future examination. Again, none of that is in the

referee's statement of the contents of the room, but a player might have

sufficient credibility to create those elements, as they are consistent

with what is given.

Given sufficient credibility, a player could create the side door

through which he escapes. That is the concept of director stance.

Referees do it all the time, but there is no inherent reason why players

could not do it.

It should be said that there is no right or wrong stance, no better or

worse way to play. There are only individual preferences of how to do

things and practical considerations in how to make any particular game

work. All of these stances are the right choice for some type of role

playing game. It might or might not be a type you would enjoy, but

people do enjoy playing in games that do these various things.

Of course, if system is all about apportioning credibility, what then

are rules? Are the baker's dozen books of /Original Advanced Dungeons &

Dragons/ completely meaningless? Is there no difference at all between

/Aftermath/ and /Amber Diceless/? Are those who work to create new games

wasting their efforts in view of the fact that the rules in the book are

not the system?

The relationship between rules and system took some time to develop, and

is difficult to understand. Rules have *authority*, or perhaps more

precisely are authorities. They are authorities in the same sense that

case law is an authority for courts, or that scriptures are authorities

for religions: the people involved refer to these and invoke them in

support of their statements, and so increase the credibility of those

statements.

Thus for example a player running a ranger in /Dungeons & Dragons/ might

say that his character was going to use his tracking ability to identify

which way the opponent went. Probably this would be accepted as within

the credibility of the player. However, if the referee were unaware that

the ranger had tracking skill, the player could point to the section of

the rules in which tracking skill is identified and explained and so

give credibility to his stated action.

Note that rules do not have credibility. They cannot make statements of

themselves, but must be cited by a person with credibility. Further, the

authority of the rules is subject to the credibility of persons involved

in the game. Can the ranger track an opponent across the ocean floor?

Someone has the credibility to decide whether the rules apply, and how

they are to be understood. There may be a rule somewhere in the books

that covers this situation, but if no one uses it, it is not part of the

system, as it does not influence what is mutually imagined.

Once we recognize that rules are authorities used to support the

credibility of statements made by people, it is a short step to realize

that everything else outside the minds and statements of the people is

at best another authority. The dice are not part of the system, but

rather an authority to which someone appeals in determining an outcome.

Whether the referee can ignore the dice or not is part of the system;

whether the players can force him to follow the dice is part of the

system; but in using the dice, we are appealing to the authority of the

dice. This applies also to charts and tables, character papers, world

descriptions, modules and supplements, and the wealth of other

informational supports we use in play. We are using the real system of

the game whenever we decide what happens in our imagined reality; if we

use dice, or charts, or ability scores, or skill ratings, we are

appealing to authority to support those decisions, but it is still

always we the players who decide.

In the end, a role playing game is a conversation between a group of

people in which they describe to each other certain imagined events that

they create as they describe them. Everything else that we see as part

of the game exists to support that activity, and to determine whose

statements about what happens will be accepted by everyone.

If your reaction to that is, /Is that all there is?/ you have my

condolences. In a sense, yes, that is all there is. However, that is the

most powerful secret of game design that has yet been uncovered, and to

the degree that you can understand, support, and exploit this central

concept, you can design or play a great game.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/M. Joseph Young is author game books and novels for Multiverser: The

Game <http://www.mjyoung.net/publish>, and a prolific contributor to

role playing game literature. Among his online work is his long-running

/Game Ideas /Un/limited/ series at Gaming Outpost

<http://www.gamingoutpost.com/>, /Faith and Gaming/ series in the

Chaplain's corner of The Christian Gamers Guild

<http://www.geocities.com/christian_gamers_guild/>, and the three-part

/Law and Enforcement in Imaginary Realms/ in this e-zine, beginning with

/The Source of Law <http://ptgptb.humbug.org.au/0009/law01.html>/ in

issue nine./

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