24. Action Rolls - Elasticity and Position and Effect
Okay, elasticity. I was planning to do a whole blog post on it, and I probably will, in the hope that a stand-alone piece has the reach. But let’s talk about it: Elasticity is a relative length of time that a game will let you keep playing incorrectly before it snaps you back to the rules.
When we say incorrectly here, I specifically mean Against Procedure. Not bad or good or wrong, but when will the game interrupt and say “hey, you’re not doing this right”. Elasticity is only of importance to people attempting to play within the procedure, if you’re intentionally violating the flowchart, that’s okay, that isn’t what this is about.
Here’s an example, Blades heads - Have you ever had an Action Roll, and only afterwards said “aww shit we didn’t do position and effect”? That’s the moment of Elasticity. The snapping back. Letting you know you aren’t playing it right. Have you ever rolled dice and said “wait, we never established what Action Rating this is using”? Probably not, and that’s because Action Ratings have very fast elasticity.
Elasticity is important because play is “wobbled through the prism of personality” (Martin Amis in 2003, referring to the less structural parts of poker), and we assume some degree of interpretation and malleability. But games still have things to say, otherwise they’d all just tell us to figure it out ourselves. Elasticity occurs when the game enforces that thing it has to say, enforces that procedure. This is related to, but not the same as Vincent Baker’s 2009 “IIEE with Teeth”. For one thing, Baker takes a much stronger value-stance on the lack of enforcement than I do, (specifically in reference to a pie in the comments), but more specifically, Vincent’s approach is wholly forward-looking. Here’s where we agree:
“ Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn’t the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won’t make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, “yeah, we didn’t really see why we’d do that, so we didn’t bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn’t that fun,” and you’re slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players’ discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you’ve given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn’t correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they’ll come to it with habits they’ve learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all’s well, but if they don’t, and your game doesn’t reach into their play and correct them, they’ll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you?”
Consider Self-Enforcement to be the fastest and shortest (and, interestingly, most disruptive) form of Elasticity.
The terms agree, but Self-Enforcement cares about what you have to do before you resolve, and Elasticity cares about what happens after, and when it becomes an impact. How far can you play before the game snaps you back and what does the snapping look like? I think XP triggers are a really funny version of this: A player gets to the end and the game says “did you express your drive” and the player says “ahhh yeah I get two xp, because remember when I killed that guy? I did that because I once vowed to uhh kill all the Duskvolians (Dusvolites?). Yep. Mark XP!” The elasticity of the rule allows the player to recontextualise play, and it’s totally harmless.
If we consider Elasticity to have two axes, we have the length of time, and the amount of disruption it causes. The disruption is, like, how much damage it does to the game to be performed afterward.
Marking XP above is a long time (could be a whole session), but is minorly disruptive, if at all. It’s all recontextualsation.
Marking a Desperate roll is fast, but non-disruptive (which is why it is so often missed)
Choosing an Action Rating is very fast, but also very disruptive.
Load is, if you ask me, a long elasticity problem and actually pretty disruptive. (For all it’s praise, I think there’s a lot of work to be done on Load. But we’ll have to wait until page 57 or 125 to talk about that.)
Baker (2009) talks about non-self-enforcing mechanics in games as an issue to resolve: “Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing.” Broadly, I agree that self-enforcement saves some headaches, but more broadly, and specifically in the sense of elasticity, I think that non-self-enforcing designs are just fine. Imagine a version of Blades that asked you to decide before acting if the action highlighted your beliefs, background, or drives and whether or not it allowed you to mark XP? I don’t think that’s a better game to play in any way.
Self-Enforcement, as I said earlier, is the fastest and most disruptive form of Elasticity. Fast because it happens immediately (or as close as it can) and disruptive because the key to self-enforcement is that it prevents play from continuing without doing the procedure.
So what does this have to do with Position and Effect? Well, Position and Effect are not Self-Enforcing when Action Ratings are. You can roll dice and be half-way through resisting consequences before a player says “wait, level 3 harm!? That was Desperate?!” and at that point the negotiation would be inauthenthic.
As designers and GMs and players, I think it’s an interesting question to put forward: Can position and effect negotiation occur after a role effectively? If it can, why does it happen before the roll, when it would be easier to just discuss risk or success if those actually occur. If it can’t, why not make it self-enforcing? Why not make it more or less disruptive? Why not give it a longer leash, slower elasticity.
Header image is "rubber band ball | the both and | shorts and longs | julie rybarczyk" by shorts and longs is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
