Errors That Don't Count

Many of my readers believe that I am a simulationist ... which, according to the stumbling mess that is GNS Theory says that I am most concerned with the recreation of reality. Well, GNS doesn't actually say that, but since GNS doesn't actually say anything, beyond broad strokes of disclarity that would make a gypsy fortune-teller blush, but that is the general idea. My world is the 'real' world (I play my game on planet Earth), so obviously when things about my world don't match up with the reality - like some of the prices on my market tables - someone bitches at me.

Fiddlesticks. I'm not a simulationist, nor am I a narrativist nor a gamist. All three facets must be embraced - nay, it would be impossible not to embrace them - and therefore the weakness in the theory is its inability to classify. At any rate, I would not turn to gaming theory to describe myself, because in all honesty gaming theory takes a pie in the face where it comes to role-playing. Role-playing has an underlying structure that IS a game, and must be treated as a game, but the overall process of play does not take place as a game. It is both a presentation and a performance, the stage manager, director and actors working jointly to produce a show for a ghost audience. The actors themselves are the audience. The DM is the audience. The state of affairs, the manner in which the 'game' stacks up, defies metaphor.

If I am anything, where it comes to the manner in which my world is made, or the purpose to which it is put, that would be 'set designer.' I don't care if the result simulates reality, I only care that the result produces a theatrical effect. My description of an Islamic bureaucracy is free to be utterly, wildly, ridiculously inaccurate, in the extreme ... but if it carries across the annoyance, the frustration, the dismissiveness of a group of strangers for the party who is forced to wait and does not dare to raise their ire, then I have succeeded as a set designer. To hell with simulation.

As such, it bothers me when someone says that the price of a suit of armor is too high or too low compared with the price of a suit of clothes. What material difference does it make to role-play? The price of either must be some amount; the price of either is, after some manner, ultimately affordable. If the price doesn't match up what Walmart would sell either for, that is a matter of complete indifference to me. My concern is that the players spend their wealth to buy things at prices that fit a system in my setting. They see the price for clothes. They look at their money. They make a judgement. The frame has no error.

There is a tremendous push in the present day for deciding there are errors in things where no real error exists. The fan boy smugness, for instance, of declaring that a hub cap in a film supposed to take place in 1964 was not actually invented until 1966. As if to say, "My, what a crappy film!" As opposed to the simple reality that the set designer was able to find that hub cap, it was more or less from the approximate period, and the exactitude of the hub cap's presence has no influence on whether the lead has realized in scene 34 that the friend he has always relied upon is, in fact, the murderer of his father. The average fan boy is rather in the dark about the purpose of theatre, or hub caps. Particulars DON'T matter. Details that do not apply expressly to the action are of scant importance.

Without question, there's a certain superiority in knowing that this hub cap was made by this company in 1966, but it is a vague, pathetic superiority. I find some humour in the thought that the set designer in the film knew perfectly well that it was the wrong year, but didn't really care. The total number of audience viewers who could conceivably know as well, reduced to those who thought the matter important, reduced further still to the sprinkling of numbnuts who might despise the movie on account of it, hardly makes for a reason to spend another half day searching for a hub cap made two years earlier.

So in the making of my world, I comfortably fudge, fake, scrimp on the details and outright dismiss reality because I'm not interested in reproducing reality. I'm interested in producing a set upon which players can feel close enough to reality to get worried, excited, shocked, angry and thrilled. I have an agenda. That agenda is to produce a world that can operate as a playground. My agenda is NOT to win the nobel prize of world creation. If there were such a thing, I wouldn't be interested. That's not my thing.

I work hard on my world. It is extensive and complex and filled with detail. It's remarkable, really. It doesn't need to be honest, too.