anyway.

"Macho nar yangers" comes from the 20' by 20' Room thread Push/Pull, Yin/Yang, and All That Jazz, and is courtesy Jim Henley.

I think you probably are pretty much a macho nar yanger. You're also someone that, from what I've seen, pushes and pulls—which strengthens my suspicions that neither push nor pull is inherently macho nor non-macho.

But then, I'm a macho-nar-yanger who is married to a femmy-nar-yinner, so what do I know?

"How many of you know that until maybe three years ago, I believed that RPG rules were for gaming groups who couldn't figure out how to work together?"

Until about six months ago, I was sure that RPG rules were the absolute bedrock that groups needed in order to work together to build anything else of real value.

Until two months ago, I had managed to convince myself that I, personally, had no problems at all with the GM having complete and absolute authority in their own game.

(I'm still behind the rest of you folks, but I'm catching up).

Now, can you imagine what we'll all know next year?

I find the categorization (of games, people, rules) into "pushers" and "pullers" unfortunate, since any account of successful play I can think of does both, but that's neither here nor there.

Hey, Vincent?  Do you remember that Polaris playtest we did (the one with Emily: pink blobs and eyelid-cutting-off)?  Do you remember how much we pulled at each other?

You were like "there's a flashback with Kerhah, huh?  Cool!  I'm going to make myself complicit in Kerhah's corruption."

I was like "Oh, there's a demon taunting me, huh?  Cool!  I'm going to bind it to myself."

I'm curious how much of that sort of pulling there was in your freeform experience.

yrs—
—Ben

P.S.  Hey, check out Dogs, too:  "Okay, GM.  We're going to take your fiction, deeply personally invest in it, and through that investment radically alter it."

Ben,

I agree, you can't have push and pull in a void and alone. Though it might be interesting to see more BtI type games where most of the push comes from time limit...

However, I think that a lot of the rhetoric around the point isn't so dangerous as you fear. It looks to me less like "I'M A PULLER ALL THE TIME!" and more like "Oh, I'm really excited about this and so want to say that I've always had this little uncomfortable part that couldn't fit into a lot of stuff, and now I see a way it might fit in and so I'm going to identify with that even though I don't think it is all of what I do in game, it just makes it easier to find my niche if I overemphasize my stance in order to make it clear how interesting I find this."

Which, really, isn't all that different from things we've seen in various other developments, or from group identification with just about any idea ever. So if you look at it less like "I'm a puller that means I never push and hate those who do" and more like a Myers-Briggs type indicator, it puts a lot of the worry at ease.

P.S. Dog's whole "the players made a statement, in the next town amplify the situation and go 'What about NOW?'" is a pull thing too, I'm thinking. You can't force someone to make a statement, but you can sure lead them right up to the pond and suggest that dunking their head in would be a great idea.

I keep trying to get that across to people. I'm, like, one of the least macho, in-your-face, pushy bastard roleplayers I know - right up until someone invites me to push them. But having a TOOL beats the hell out of not having any tools - and having a way to know when somebody wants to get rough is really good too.

Sometimes I think that gamer identity politics is just inevitable.

Yeah, but see, three years ago you would've been one of those freeform fundamentalists that everyone hated.

That's why we love you Vincent, you're on the cutting edge of what's currently misunderstood and despised in RPGs.  All the hip kids want to be like you.

"The GM doesn't run the world and you don't own your character."
"Commie Pinko Hippy!"

*six months later*

"Yeah, so we pushed GM-less, player-less play into our d20 game.  I'm getting some resistance, but ownerless play the only way to have a proper game."
"What?  Naw, dude, if something in the game isn't owned, isn't wholeheartedly owned, then it really isn't in the game at all."
"Fascist Dictator!"
"*sigh*"
Tom

Vincent,

Alright, I'm thinking about pushing and pulling and yin and yang and macho whatever.

And I'm thinking of the way Vincent and I play off one another when we're at the table.  Its pretty cool and dramatically, its fairly full contact but we're not only pushing each other's dramatic buttons about what excites us about the game at hand but we're also clearing the way for the other player to take a step and have a moment.

I just don't see what is macho about that.

I'm still damned confused by this pulling and pushing vocab.

Hmf.

Hang on, I think I just got it.  This takes an example, bear with me, if you would.

——-The Example——

I'm fiddling with a game where players make up a story, taking turns - it's not a RPG, but it'll serve.

A round starts with one player narrating a bit of story.  Others then respond, like so:

Yes, That's Right: This response is simply a way of 'passing' to the next player, skipping your turn in this round.  When you make this response, the leader of the round must pay you one authority chip, if they have any.

Yes, And Also: This response is used to indicate an addition.  The player sating it may continue speaking, adding a single idea to the sentence already in play.  This response doesn't cost or gain the speaker authority.

The Way I Heard It: This reponse is used to indicate a change to the story; you may carry on speaking and make change one thing in the sentence orginally given or in any addition - however, your change cannot invalidate the rest of what has already been said.  To use this response, you must pay one authorityto the leader of the round, and one to each player that has said "Yes, that's right" in this round.

—————-

Now.  If I've got it, "The way I heard it" supports strong Push.  "Yes, and also" suppots weak Push.  "Yes, that's right is neutral".

A Pull response would be "Was there more?" - asked of another player, and giving them the opportunity to pay you one authority to make another "and also" statement.

Like that?  Or am I still lost?

And because I seem in danger of destroying yet another of Vincent's threads....

Five years ago I believed it was the GMs job to control the game and act both as the social, rules, and story arbiter for the game. I was very good at moving my players about, manipulating their emotions, shaving their heads, making them cry until they crawled under the bed to hide, and considered this the best that game could hope to provide.

I also was a big liar shit, as I often pretended to use rules that I was really just ignoring to add credibility to my forcing people around and to make my players feel like they had a choice in what they were doing.

I find it hard to concieve of anything more macho-bully than what I was doing back then. I got people at my table and beat them round and round the rock, and then made them like it.

Yet now I always get players telling me that I'm mean and push them around without mercy. When I am giving them all the power and just watching as they ram into the world at top speed.

There's also the problem of levels again. Games like DitV may be push heavy in the mechanics (althoguh DitV maybe less so than others), but that doesn't say anything about push and pull at the social level.

I think part of the origin of push heavy mechanics is that mechanics (particualrly with a "say yes or roll the dice" rule) are about handling potential failure situations (game failure, not character failure). While pull dynamics have their own form of failure, it isn't as dramatic a failure as bad push mechanics. Also, I think push is harder to do without mechanics, as pull is about agreement, while push is about disagreement.

Also, pull mechanics (fan mail in PTA is a pull mechanic) are being developed along with push mechanics (by the same people), but I think maybe so far they tend to be side mechanics, rather than the core mechanics.

Actually, isn't PTA a pretty pull rich game in general?

Judd: The way I figure it, "macho nar yanger" has everything to do with how I talk about play, and nothing to do with how I do play.

This reminds me of a GenCon story. Here's me at the Forge booth, one of those many times when the booth is totally full and hopping and doesn't need me at all, and I just angle myself toward whoever's nearby in the aisle to chat and watch. It's Gregor.

"You're not like I expected," he says.

"Really?" I say.

"Sure, I expected you to go about in a great duster, like -" and he does pantomime about a great big mean guy in a duster, scowling "- putting your cigar out on people."

Hi Charles,

Also, I think push is harder to do without mechanics, as pull is about agreement, while push is about disagreement.

I agree.  This also gets at Ben's question from upthread: my experience, at least of our free-form, is that it is a pull fest.  We talked about this last summer: our varieties of free-form are additive primarily.

For example, I describe something that my character does, you make this suggestion about how that would interact with an aspect of the world. I make up something new about a local culture that would be neat with those and *voila*, we then can see what the ramifications are of my originally described character actions.

PTA is pull heavy in my experience.  At least, the atmosphere that it creates (with the pitch session, scene framing & everyone being enjoined to suggest things that highlight each other's character issues plus fan mail) makes additive collaborative exploration easy & fun.

Does that match how others see pull?

Charles, I want to check something out here. This of yours:

I think part of the origin of push heavy mechanics is that mechanics (particualrly with a "say yes or roll the dice" rule) are about handling potential failure situations (game failure, not character failure). While pull dynamics have their own form of failure, it isn't as dramatic a failure as bad push mechanics. Also, I think push is harder to do without mechanics, as pull is about agreement, while push is about disagreement.

Reads to me as the same sentiment as this of mine:

RPG rules [are] for gaming groups who [can't] figure out how to work together

Do you mean something different?

FWIW and if anyone cares, I'd probably say Yes re your rhetoric and only kinda sorta as a designer. (The designs of yours I know best are Dogs and Nighttime Animals.) As to play style, I just wouldn't know. Also, ditto to Brand's comment 5, par 2.

I find it hard to concieve of anything more macho-bully than what I was doing back then. I got people at my table and beat them round and round the rock, and then made them like it.

Brand, yes, a certain style of Illusionist GMing is, in Song of Ice and Fire terms, a bizarre amalgam of Gregor Clegane and Varys the Spider. But in that style the idea isn't "Let's you and me fight" (macho), but "Let me kick the legs out from under you preemptively," isn't it? That's something different from the Push-Push ideal Mo was talking about in her original essay, I think. "Good play" on the part of the PCs can be glossed as "Get Pushed." It's a more one-sided macho.

I knew.

I suspected.

Vincent,

You asked if what I said was equivalent to

RPG rules [are] for gaming groups who [can't] figure out how to work together

No, I don't mean that.  I mean that if you want to do confrontational play, where "This happens," "No, it doesn't!"  or even "I want this to happen," "I say it fails," are viable interactions, then you are probably going to need some form of resolution mechanics.

So long as you stick to pull interactions, where players follow each others leads and don't disagree, then you you don't need resolution mechanics (that would be the "Say Yes" part of "Say Yes or Roll the Dice," I think).

I think what I'm saying is:

RPG formal resolution mechanics are for gaming groups who have decided that they want other options than always working together on everything.

The failure aspect is this:

As long as the other players either say "yes," or ignore my contribution, play continues. When another player says "No!"  then play stops. What happens in the fiction is now undecided or blatantly inconsistent, and we need to resolve the no into someone saying yes to something (the yes may be me saying "yes, my contested contribution doesn't happen"). As long as we can't resolve to a yes, then the game is frozen. If we never resolve to a yes, then the game is done.

Consistent failure to respond to pulls can lead to a game so boring that everyone quits (or talks about tv shows instead), but a single refusal to respond to a pull can't end the game (you have to turn the pull into a push, by saying, "You must add creatively to this," before you can say, "or I leave the game.").  A single push can end the game if it is forced implacably and resisted implacably.

I think many mechanics exist to mediate pushes, to ensure that implacable push never meets implacable resistance, because either someone always explicitly has the upper hand, or because a randomizer is used to pick between two implacable choices.

I don't think I'm saying anything radical or original here. You rejected "rules are for players who don't know how to get along," because you realized that there are times when trying to get along won't produce as good of play as not trying to get along. The rules are added to make not getting along fun and productive.