anyway.

> Does anybody think that the former isn't a push on my part, or that the latter isn't a pull?

Yes, but I'm not a "push/pull advocate", so it may not matter.

To me, it just looks like the first situation is "I'm gonna Push, and I'm not gonna let you Push back."

The second sitation is "I'm gonna Push, but you could Push back if you felt like it."

Now, maybe that's what Pull is, but it still looks like all Pushing to me.

I'm totally with you, V. Good examples.

Seems to me there are two things going on:
a) the throw
b) the outcome
You're totally pushing the throw in the first example, but allowing input on the outcome. In the second example, you're allowing input on both.
That's meaningful insofar as that you could also have said, "I throw. You die." That'd be pushing all the way.

I think that in the first example "I throw you off the building" was Pushed, while "What happens on the way down" is being Pulled. In the second "What happens when I try to throw you off the building" is being Pulled.

I'm probably utterly off base here, but hear me out:

Pull and push both involve putting forward some content with the expectation of a response, it's communication after all. The difference I see is that push gives the content authority, while pull expressly puts the content in a void, in a need for authority.

So you get four different communications:

"successful" push - authority is not challenged - you get what you want at the cost of engagement.

"failed" push - authority challenged - you get engagement, but may not get what you want.

"successful" pull - authority provided - you get what you want and get engagement.

"failed" pull - authority witheld - you get may not get what you want, and no engagement either.

I put them in quotes because you may want a push to fail, in order to get engagement. Or you may want to reduce engagement with a "failing" pull.

It seems to me your two examples are of "successful" push and "failed" push.

Hi, :)

I'm gonna pipe in here and try my hand at this. Ever since I've heard of push/pull, I've found it extremely intuitive to understand, but damn hard to talk about.

Allow me to switch examples on you. The situation is, your character is sitting on a park bench.

If I have my character sit on the same bench and start talking to yours, I'm pushing. I'm forcing you to address my conversation, even if your response is just to ignore you. Grantedly, that's a mild push, but a push nonetheless. As a player, you're forced to acknowledge my actions and respond.

If, on the other hand, I say my character sits on the same bench but away from yours a bit, and sort of looks at you as if he wants to talk about something, then I'm pulling. I'm putting my desire for conversation on the table, allowing you to act on that desire, as wanted. As a player, you don't even have to acknowledge my actions.

Getting back to your examples, from my point of view, they are both pushes. Grantedly, the first one is a much stronger push than the second one, but both of them create a situation than I am forced to acknowledge and address.

Soliciting input is not the same as creating an opportunity to provide it.

Cheers,
J.

Roger, Mendel and JMMM:

Do you see that you're disagreeing with Brand (and with Mo's explicit endorsement) about the moment of crisis? Do you care?

> Do you see that you're disagreeing with Brand (and with Mo's explicit endorsement) about the moment of crisis?

Aha... after reading that over again, I think I see what's going on here.  I absolutely agree with what Brand says in:

> How do we know if something is a moment of crisis or not? That is tricky...

First, a quick review of the rest of Brand's post:

> If you get the other people's investment before bringing the moment of crisis by soliciting input, buy-in, and authority sharing then it is pull.

> If you get the other people's responses after you have already brought the moment of crisis by using your authority to force something, then it is push.

(emphasis mine.)

So here was my sincere reading of your example:

I say, "I grab you, heft you bodily, and pitch you over. I'm like, 'scumsucker.' Bricks flash by as you fall; maybe you try to catch a window sill but you can't. But look, my guy wants you to die, not me. Let's come up with some other outcome than you die."

Yep, there's the moment of crisis.  It's not only been brought, here—it's already been resolved.  I'm not entirely sure if a unilaterally-resolved moment of crisis should even be considered a proper "moment of crisis" per se, but I'll let more expert heads puzzle that one out.

Anyway, everyone (I think) agrees that that's Push, so let's not belabour it too much longer.  The second example is the contentious one.

I say, "I grab you, heft you bodily, and pitch you over. I'm like, 'scumsucker.' I think that should totally happen and your character should fall to his death, like totally dead. What do you think?"

You say, "not so much. How about, you go to grab me, but I slip out of your grip and run?"

Alright, I read that, and I think: hey look, there's the moment of crisis.  Vincent has Pushed me into it.  Now we're negotiating how to resolve the moment of crisis.

And I'm not trying to be obtuse in that.  I'm sure that in a couple weeks, I'll still be telling people the game anecdote of when Vincent tried to push me off a building.  I think this sort of "anecdote test" is as good a way as recognizing moments of crisis as any.

At the same time, I can now clearly see a differing opinion:  Vincent isn't Pushing a moment of crisis here—he's just suggesting we could have one.

If I say "No way, Vincent—I squirm out and run off into the distance" then we're not resolving the crisis—we're merely deferring it.

Under that interpretation, yeah, it's obviously a Pull.  Two weeks from now, we won't be reminiscing about this scene—it'll all be about what happened when the crisis could no longer be deferred, and actually got resolved.

As Brand says, recognizing moments of crises is a tricky business.

Hey, :)

> you're disagreeing with Brand about the moment of crisis

Ok, I must admit I hadn't noticed Brand's last post. (In my defense, I was thoroughly convinced that Yudhisthira's Dice was dead, pending a merge of some sort with Sin Aesthetics.)

In re-reading, I would claim that it's not so much that I'm disagreeing, as that I am bringing (probably undue) assumptions about what the moment of crisis is in the various examples.

In my conversation example, I assumed that beginning a conversation between the characters was a moment of crisis. Weird, perhaps, but that's what was in my head. (Ok, so maybe it wasn't the end-all-be-all of crises as far as crises go, but we're assuming the existence of shades of crisis, I hope...)

As far as your two examples are concerned, I've been reading and rereading them and I can't seem to find a way to place either of them in a game situation without it representing a moment of crisis, so I'm still having trouble seeing either of them as pulls.

Again, I freely admit that these may be undue assumptions on my part, so yeah, I can see how it might appear that I was disagreeing, when in reality, I was not. Honest, I wasn't. Like I said, this stuff is all extremely intuitive to me, including the bit about moments of crisis, but for some reason, I'm finding it damn hard to verbalize.

Cheers,
J.

Vincent,

I'm with you.

There are other forms of pull, but that is definitely pull (assuming that what actually happened was that my character wriggled out of your character's grasp).

An example of another form of pull?

"Okay, your character wants mine dead, what happens next?"

"My character throws yours off the roof top. Your character is plummeting down. How does she survive the fall?"

"Ouch! That's not what I was expecting, but... Okay, she lands on a mattress truck." [my previous statement was a binding agreement to accept your input on the moment of crisis, whatever your input would be, so you didn't assert your own authority as in the first example]

Is that still DitM?

Okay, let me see if I understand what definition Vincent and Brand are using:

If I have to buy in for there to be a moment of crisis, it is a pull.

If a moment of crisis can be forced on me, it is a push.

Is the above correct?

-Lisa Padol

Lisa: I read Brand to be saying that there's a moment of crisis in either case.

It's push if I take us to the moment of crisis without getting your buy-in and input first.

It's pull if I get your buy-in and input before we go to the moment of crisis.

Either way, there is the moment of crisis, we do go to it.

Hm, this may explain why I keep thinking of example #2 as a push, when it clearly reads as a pull by Brand's definition.

That is:

Pretending that I'm the player whose character you want to push off the roof, I think the second example feels to me like a pull because it is pushing me, the player, into a moment of crisis: Do I accept this really high oomph thing or don't I? It makes me uncomfortable because of

a) the scale

b) the lack of a context that would make me comfortable

There is no way you can provide b) in your example, so no foul there—we're not actually playing a game, et cetera, und so weiter. In principle, in an actual game, there might well be a b), in which case a) might not be a problem.

That said, I think you may be confusing pull with crisis.

Hm, that doesn't read right. I think you may be discounting the invitation to a crisis. That is, if you need my input before we go to the moment of crisis, and you invite it, let's say by leaving a ring out for my thief, and I decide it's not that important / I don't want to go there / whatever—I decline the invitation—does that make it suddenly not a pull?

Am I making sense?

-Lisa

I have responses to many issues, new issues, confusion over what we mean by "resolution," talk about why pushes can feel like pulls and pulls like pushes, why AtE/ItM do and do not feel like P/P, and other crazyness here: http://yudhishthirasdice.blogspot.com/2006/05/guess-whos-back-back-again.html

This may only make things worse. We'll see.

Here's the link: Guess Who's Back, Back Again?

Lisa: The moment of crisis is when you take my ring or not. If I leave the ring out, there absolutely will be a moment of crisis - you'll take the ring or you won't. The moment of crisis is and now we know.

Thanks—gonna chew on that.

-Lisa