Yudhishthira’s Dice

Recently in a thread on Knife Fight, I said:

As we move back and forth between games where you play a character, games where you tell a story through a character, games where you tell a story based around a character, and games where you tell a story, we’re going to have to work out more advanced methods of knowing not just where and when we can step in, but where and when we should. I think we’re still in the early stages of that, and there is a lot of work left to do there.

I think this is something worth considering at multiple stages of game.

If you are designing a game you need to let your audience know how to play it. We all know this, right? Okay, so if you are marketing a game that is about telling a story without focal characters to the existing market of RPG players who are used to playing a character, you need to have some specific guidance for them (system based as well as explanations) as to what that means. Some games already do this to greater and lesser degrees — for example, its hard to read Universalis and not know that a game of it is inherently going to be different than a traditional game of Vampire. The very way the game is set up, talks about character and focus, and shows examples of play all say “this is not about playing a character, it is about telling a story.”

If you are GMing a game with different assumptions than your group normally uses, you might want to talk to the other people about what to expect about the game play. I don’t mean long painful conversations, but a short “in this game you aren’t playing a character as much as you are telling a story through your character” talk is probably not out of order the first time you’re playing a new game or a new style of game. Forewarned is fore armed, after all.

I’ve actually had an AP experience on that note that was shockingly revealing to me. I have a friend that is an awesome RPer. He’s hardcore and deft in his portrayal of character, and has recently been making strides in thinking about story in RPGs with startling speed. But there were occasional bumps in the road. So one night we played My Life With Master, and I explained it as a story game about the fall of a master being dethroned by his servants, and oh by the way you play the servants. I didn’t even do this consciously, I was just thinking in those terms that night. But because I described it to this player as something other than “an RPG where you play a character” in a direct fashion, that night he came instantly and consistently to address of premise and worked harder at making the story work than making his character work. (The character still worked out awesomely well, btw.)

Now, to be honest, games on the far ends of the spectrum are probably the easiest to explain. If you are telling a story and don’t even have characters that you’re playing — or all share the same character (City of Birds?) — then it’s pretty easy to differentiate from an immersionist RPG in which the whole point is to be in one character and who cares about story. Its the games that do the lines in between, the ones that are in blurrier boundaries of telling a story through a character and telling a story based around a character, that you need to pay particularly sharp attention.

How is this game going to deal with it when the character is forced to do something the player of that character would not want to happen? If it is a physical action or failure? What if it is an emotional response, such as being forced by a dice roll to say that this character now loves someone that they hated five minutes ago in such a way that the player can’t even understand why it happened?

Its worth thinking about this kind of thing because for a lot of established players, play is something they do largely by instinct, precedent, and an many unexamined techniques and assumptions about “this is how you play an RPG.” (And no, I’m not talking about Forgites vs. non or any such thing. Everyone I’ve ever played with does this to some degree. I know I do it a lot.) So if you are doing something with a game that might require a different stance, it helps a lot in getting over the rough bumps if you set your game up to obviously follow a different stance. Let people know up front that they shouldn’t be trying to tell a story, or they shouldn’t be trying to control their characters emotions, or whatever specifics are needed to smooth the road for the kind of play you want your game to have.

And, of course, as a player in a game it behooves us to pay attention to what we are being told about the game and adjust our play as much as possible to fit with what is going on. Just because the game is asking something different of us doesn’t mean it is wrong, but it may mean that we need to change how we approach it. (Even if that change is not playing that game anymore.)

Of course, that requires that you know what kind of play you want your game to have, which is probably why its so damn hard.