38. Gathering Information - On Force, Establishment, and a Pair of Pliers
Gathering Information is so often passed over during play. But to me, it’s one of my favourite parts of play. As a designer, I think it’s honestly one of the most interesting versions of a game. I want to talk a little bit about why before we launch into how Blades plays, and then where Gathering Information can be smoothed at the table.
“The flow of information from the GM to the players about the fictional world is very important in a roleplaying game [...]”
I would go so far as to say “the most important”. When I was focusing strictly on PbtA, I found the gathering information process to be the most compelling expression of a designer’s vision. In that context I used to call it “fiction interrogation”, but here we’re just going to call it Gathering Information. I always found it to be the most interesting part of a design or hack because the way a game lets you turn “potential fiction” into “established fiction” (BitD, p195) defines so much about the relationship of co-creation, the stakes at hand, and what the game believes about the characters. A game that doesn’t consider how information is extracted from the GM is, in my eyes, incomplete. One of my very very few criticisms about Mothership 0e (having not had the time to explore 1e) is that the system provides no endogenous structure for players to extract information. It’s wholly diegetic. To me (and it’s a taste thing, I’m sure), that’s just an absence I can’t abide.
Harper is clear in their position: “There’s just too much going on to say everything” (p36), or, as I’d put it with p195 in mind: It would be an unpleasant act of play to establish everything, some things should be left as potential fiction, until they become important enough to earn establishment. For that reason, Gathering Information (in the same vein as Reading a Sitch, or Assessing, or even an Investigation roll) is a strictly different experience to GMs downstreaming information. This isn’t about a player saying “hey, what’s in the room?” That’s not Gathering Information, that’s communicating setting and geography and temporality. That’s freeforming, it’s playing. The act of Gathering Information as an endogenous play structure creates a mandate for the GM - A mandate indicating both authority and capacity to be the one who establishes the fiction, and also the responsibility to establish that fiction whether they want to or not. That mandate doesn’t exist in simply asking. It needs rules to support enforcement.
When we use the word extract here, we don’t mean by violence (socially or otherwise). In the same way that “interrogating the fiction” doesn’t mean using a car battery and pliers. We do, however, mean with some sort of force. With endogenous force (The rules say you have to tell me, and it has to be true), social force (you wouldn’t want to be a cheater, would you?), and the compulsion that those two things generate. The player desires established fiction because it is only against established fiction that they can leverage their own established fiction or rules. That is why the list of questions is so pointed in the truly amazing and underappreciated Cyberpunk PbtA The Sprawl — What do I notice despite an attempt to conceal it; What is my best way in/way out/way past; Who or what is my biggest threat here? (The Sprawl, Hamish Cameron, 2015) —
because to reach the threshold of “We are engaging a rule”, of “Fictional Interrogation” of “Gathering Information” we need to have a degree of conflict, and a degree of intent from the player to escalate or resolve that conflict.
This is displayed so well through one of my favourite pieces of text from Apocalypse World 2nd Edition:
Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs).
“I read the situation,” her player says.
“You do? It’s charged?” I say.
“It is now.”
“Ahh,” I say.I understand perfectly: the three NPCs don’t realize it, but Marie’s arrival charges the situation. If it were a movie, the sound track would be picking up, getting sinister.
Apocalypse World 2nd Edition, p126 (Baker & Baker, 2016)
The Apocalypse World move isn’t “when you look at something” “when you check someone out” or “when you try to understand”, it’s “when you read a charged situation”. As Baker & Baker say in this bit from p126: If it was a movie, the soundtrack would swell. The situation is pregnant with conflict, which we understand because of the rules the player invokes to establish that situation. This is beautiful because it expresses two of my foundational beliefs about games and rules:
The Endogeny informs the Diegesis in the same way the Diegesis informs the Endogeny
Rules give players a mandate[1] to enforce truths upon the other players and themeselves, and that any rule that doesn’t force someone (or everyone) to do something that they weren’t going to do on their own isn’t useful or valuable[2].
[1] - Mandate is the term suggested to me in conversation by Paul Beakley, who continues to be one of my favourite people in games. This is more me citing my sources than anything else.
[2] - As Vincent Baker says about this in a 2008 blog, this only works if the resulting “unwelcome and unwanted” (ibid.) outcome is as compelling as it is undesirable. If it is too undesirable (or, equally, not compelling) then players may reject it because it makes the act of playing the game worse (they stop playing the game, either by ending play, or by ignoring the rules). If it is unwelcome or undesirable, but incredibly compelling, then it makes the act of play more fun, and we continue[3].
[3] - This is for me the difference between the Hero overcoming setbacks and losses to become the hero, and what I’m finding in Season 6 of Burn Notice (spoilers for a 12-year old season of TV, I guess). The complications, the unwelcome and unwanted reveals are consistently less engaging than success would be. As our hero Michael Weston is trying to flee the country and start a new life, leaving everything he loves behind, he gets an offer from Bly to stay and “make things right” (a stupid mantra in the show) by doing more spy work. The nature of this dumb fucking twist is so much less compelling than fleeing the country, starting a new life, and setting his dope-as-hell mum up as an identity-less gangster in Portugal, that I feel off completely. I don’t think you care about this. But I’m six seasons in. I care. And I’m fucking mad.
Number 1 means that (even, or especially) in “Fiction-First” games where “You don’t pick a mechanic first, you say something about the fiction first.” (Fiction First Gaming - Blades p 161), I honestly believe that our choice of which mechanics to use (and, in fact, our options for which mechanics we CAN choose) inform the story. There is a reality that a player advocating for a character with 3 dots in Skirmish and 0 dots in Carouse is more likely to fight than talk. That choice isn’t “fiction first”, and it isn’t “mechanics first” either (presenting them as a dichotomy does a disservice to the experience). Instead, it’s about the game-as-a-game and the game-as-a-story synergising with each other to create a result greater than the sum of its parts. By this I mean that in our earlier AW2e example of Reading the Charged Situation, Marie is an interesting character in an interesting narrative, and Read a Charged Situation is an interesting set of mechanics. By framing Marie using the mechanics of Apocalypse World we drive players to make interesting decisions and say interesting things to manipulate Marie’s interesting story. And by using the dynamic, active, and interesting character of Marie, we give life, context, and stakes to the Moves of Apocalypse World. By combining the two, both are improved.
Number two is about this extraction idea, this force, a degree of compulsion. If the GM says that the a particular Red Sash is an excellent fighter (to use our returning example), and I ask how good, the GM can say as much or as little detail as they wish. They can tell me this Red Sash fights like a whirlwind. They can tell me any Red Sash Swordsman could face the galloping hordes, a hundred bad guys with swords. Or they could simply stare me down and say “your character doesn’t know them”. But this is about games, right. This is about Show, Don’t Tell. So we force the GM to show us by evoking the Endogeny: “I would like to Gather Information on this Red Sash Fellow. How good is he?”. In Baker & Baker’s earlier example, Marie’s player can ask all they want about the situation between them (up to, and including, asking questions that are on the Read a Sitch list) but the MC is under no compulsion to answer them at all, and if they do choose to answer, there’s no compulsion for them to tell the truth. In the text’s example, the player asks who the biggest threat is, and the MC responds:
“Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard fucker. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.”
AW2e p127 (Baker & Baker, 2016)
The player has extracted not only the truth, but also the details that support that truth. This extraction establishes what was previously potential fiction (“We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.” AW2e p127), and demands that MC set in stone some facts that players can now leverage.
This is the very essence of Gathering Information and why I think that conversation is critical.
Tomorrow, we talk about the nature of Gathering Information in Blades. The homework questions would be “can a player gather information during a score?” If you have a solid answer to that, you’re going to love what’s coming up tomorrow.
Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus
The header image, "The Detective" by paurian, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
