My black box campaign for Luke Gearing's Gradient Descent recently wrapped
up. I didn't plan on it ending before the end of the year, but things happen, and sometimes godlike AI systems trigger nuclear warheads. You
can read up on the butterfly dream campaign here. Running it for thirteen weeks was a lot of fun. I promised my players I'd shine a light into the black box after the campaign ended. I will try to do this in this post but I am also using it as an excuse to write down some other thoughts on the experience.
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| This is how it ended?! |
Diegetic Primacy
Having
read blogs on different playstyles that focus on the way they engage
with how abstraction is employed in their games got me wanting to try
something new myself. I will admit that I still don't know how my
approach actually lines up with the different labels (link to the FKR
blogs here).
For
my game, I wanted to immerse the players and myself in a fictional
world and minimize the abstractions necessary, namely the layers
between the players and the fiction. This is actually a bit misleading, as it is all within the realm of abstractions (thinking, imagining, speaking, etc.). In order to avoid philosophical spiraling, let's just
say I didn't want to give a rules system primacy over how we engage
with the world of the fiction. Isn't it frustrating when the
enforcement of rules lessens the feel of logical consistency of a
fictional world you are engaging with? That is what drew me to the FKR (fiction first) and black box (no player-facing procedures).
Thus I committed to the primacy of the diegetic.
The Aristotelians might not like the way diegesis is employed here, but so be it. I am using it in the way I remember it being used by French philosopher Étienne Souriau as “everything that happens according to the fiction presented and what it implies if one were to consider it true” (translated freely from L'Univers filmique).
Now
what does that mean with regard to my refereeing? I tried to referee
and arbitrate the situations and conflicts within the fictional world of
play based as much as possible on the in-world diegetic logic. This
simply means before rolling any dice or tossing coins to find out the
resolution of a situation, I tried to call results based on the diegetic
in-world logic. Basically, how would this go if it were real?
I am unsure if this isn't just what the FKR crowd does. Maybe it is actually closer to New Simulationism?
Anyway,
I don't care too much for debating categories and schools of thought. I
am more interested in the way my idea of acting as a referee did
produce an interesting experience. What made it interesting for me as a
referee was a very specific tension between what I'd call the diegetic
and the narrative. Because I wanted to arbitrate on what would make sense in a fictional world according to its own rules and not what would make sense in a story. Is this differentiation even possible? Isn't everything always structured narratively? This is where it gets spicy, I think!
I'll try to formulate more thoughts on this, but first, “the how did I end up running it” part.
Behind the Screen
First I threw out all the Mothership rules, and then I took some back. In
addition to random encounter rolls (10% chance every room or 10
minutes), I decided to keep the procedures for The Bends; slowly losing your sense of humanity is a core experience of Gradient Descent.
I also kept the panic mechanic for the Monarch AI. Initially I thought
about doing the same for the player characters Stress and Sanity, but I
ended up never using it.
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| a very boring sheet for tracking The Bends. |
Players
generated their characters using a Perchance generator I made, provided
them with a short pitch for their PCs, and then put them in a shared Google Sheet character binder.
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| This is what players started with. |
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Players organized and shared gear within the collective google sheet
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A part of The Deep. |
There were no skills or classes, but the backgrounds and players never
saw or rolled any dice. However, I did negotiate with them if they
argued for something being possible or logical. For their actions,
players told me their intent and I told them the outcome.
As for
mapping, we used a Miro board. Players mostly mapped themselves. We
talked over Discord voice only, and I put on the same soundtrack every week, eventually using Kenku FM.
As
for arbitrating according to what makes sense in the world? Turns out
it isn't easy. As much as I wanted to be a neutral arbiter, I found
myself questioning my calls quite often. Could I really decide what
makes sense diegetically and rule out that I didn't just follow what
would make sense or be cool in a story?
Of
course there were always situations where it seemed clear that this
would be a random event anyway (for example, some elevators switch
speeds randomly). Those I handled by rolling d10s/1d100 already, which
made it easy to use simple percentile roles for additional things.
Whenever I wasn't sure, I would ask, How would this go if it were real? I
rolled a 1d100 to see how close the outcome would be to a character's
intent. Sometimes the roll made me realize that I didn't need it in the
first place, and I had no issues with overruling it. The only rolls I
followed strictly were those for Bends checks, random encounters, artifacts, etc.
The
feedback I got from my players was that they felt immersed to the point
that many encounters were quite tense for them, not having any
abstractions available to know what it might mean if someone fires their
gun at them (as opposed to a playing a game system where you know the
relation between your character's HP and an average damage die).
I think we all had a lot of fun and that makes the whole endeavour a success.
This is where I'd have to write a philosophy paper...
The question of a possibility of following a diegetic logic instead of a narrative logic still
lingers on my mind. I am not concerned if I achieved my initial goal in
the campaign, but I am philosophically intrigued by this. Time to actually explore this properly I do not have. This is further
complicated by the fact that I haven't fully grasped what narrative
logic actually means.
My intuition is that it leads back to the
general question on the structure of thinking and the nature of judgments (as in the Kantian sense for “Urteil”). But this is just to
namedrop a German.
The question I'd like to explore at some point remains.
How can I referee a game where things follow the principle of what would make sense in a fictional world according to its own rules and not what would make sense in a story?
If you know, tell me!
