Tonal Specificity

NOT CONTENT a collection of thoughts following a discussion around tone and procedures of play, with The Bad Doctor (of the truly excellent Was it Likely blog) on Discord.

Clarice Lispector

Thoughts about Tone

• Proposition: all swords cuts are the same. It doesn't matter what you're cutting - this is obviously not how people live. Rejoinder: yes, all sword cuts are the same. You hit your father with a sword, you roll d6, you hit a nameless goblin with a sword, you roll a d6. The difference between these two acts escapes the simulationist space. 
• The Critical Role answer to this is capital R Roleplay about the angst you feel about your dead father; the simulationist answer to this might be: yes, all people die the same way, the pathos is elsewhere. 
• You could play a game where killing your father was a bespoke act with various tests and rolls associated with it - you could try to model the specific, terrible difficulty of killing your father. The DM could make a series of rulings for this on the spot, or you could make rules around emotional turmoil/uncertainty/trauma etc., and apply them as you thought necessary. What a simulationsist space does is introduce something like radical agency/the possibility for frictionless decision making/limited sociopathy into all character decisions. You are responsible for the decision to swing the sword, not the difficulty in killing your father. You might have the additional responsibility of larping being sad (if you're a CR type of person), but this is a totally separate thing.
• There is a weird double thing going on here: do CRPGs want to believe that they encourage players to get into their characters to the extent that killing your fictional father is a more difficult thing to do than killing a nameless goblin? I think this isn't actually true, and what they do instead is set up a perfect order where things can easily be reduced to known quantities. This isn't the same as the assertion that the characters are necessarily sociopathic - that all OSR characters are professional operators who don't worry about these things. I think it's something closer to the literary refusal of interiority.
• You give dignity to the intensity of emotional trauma/specificity by NOT attempting to describe it. You see this all the time in classical literature, and a lots less past the 20th century, when a lot of writing became obsessed with making itself adequate to the emotional specificity of interiority - the mind mirroring itself, lots of formal strategies for this. In classical literature it's very common for the description of the pain to be simple - 'she struck her father down and she wept,' or 'she didn't eat for four days.' No FORMAL attention to the intensity of feeling. This, I suspect, is because the writer is making some claim about the impossibility of really representing this pain, and allowing the space for the reader to do this work themselves. 
• There is something similar in providing minimal possible structuring framework for highly dramatic activities - even killing goblins in a cave is highly dramatic. Killing your father is a different thing. The wager of the OSR/simulationist system is that you are better at providing genuine pathos than it is (I think).
• Minimalist and stripped gestures have this reticence/space for dignified self-direction coded into them at an aesthetic level - a general rule, and possibly not supportable, but I'm thinking about the perverse thing that happens where the more a given work tries to up the emotional pathos, the harder it is for the emotion to feel earned. 

Shirley Jackson

Digression on Dark Souls

• Dark Souls does this almost all the way through. There is minimal music. The weapons and armour you find are mostly utterly workmanlike, but even more than this your character moves in a completely stripped back way. Most of the time, an attack is a quick, single action - something that feels of a piece with the decision to press the button, but also something that looks roughly relatable, the way someone would conserve action if they were really swinging a sword around. There is, I think importantly, nothing particularly realistic about the combat rhythm in Dark Souls (dodge rolling, huge swords, etc etc), but the design and tone of the game are almost entirely anti-heroic.
• This gives the actual pathos and tragedy at the core of those games so much room to breathe. At no time is anyone telling you how to feel about anything - when they do they are lying to your face. You are given the courtesy of coming to the pathos in your own time, by your own means, and this makes it true and real for each player.
• Weirdly another game that I thought did this was WoW in the classic days, during the initial 0 - 60 run. I've never felt so comfortably, blissfully ignored by the world than I used to in low level WoW - bizarre, considering how that game's explicit goal was to make you feel like an epic high fantasy hero. I suspect some of it was getting in before the outrageous (and frankly stupid) power creep of the expansions, mixed in with the diegetic conceit that you were simply one powerful adventurer among many, and until level 50 or so weren't even that powerful. I have a crystal memory of hitting about level 35, and realising that I could now armour myself like a basic footman from the RTS games. Beautiful game, beautifully designed play experience. 

My boi Oscar

These murderous, ganking fucks