How I ran Gradient Descent as a Black Box (or Diegetic vs. Narrative Logic)

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.

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. 

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.

This is what players started with.

 

Players organized and shared gear within the collective google sheet

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. 

 

A part of The Deep.

 

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!