Naturalism, the Story of the Day, and RPGs
Over on anyway Vincent is, as usual, busy accidentally on purpose kicking over a hornets nest. There’s a lot of noise going on over there, and so I thought I’d step over here for a moment to say a few words that are indirectly related to what he’s talking about.
The first thing to say is: there is more than one way to “tell a story.” In fact, there are more than a hundred ways to do it. Between mode, audience, medium, and cultural variables the amount of things that go into making a story are massive. Even in RPGs you can play a very gamist game and end up with a story – and do so regularly. However, I think that in the far fringes of RPG theory land we’re coming to the point of going off into separate directions, and I think it could do well to look at those directions and some of the cultural and rhetorical stuff going on behind them.
First off “story play” and “storytelling” are very loaded terms, and very much given to value judgment and asshattery. So I’m going to try to stay away from them. All games can result in story, the question is how they go about doing that. Simulationism, for example, can make great stories – but Sim is more often concerned with making great experiences than great stories. It is more important that you get to do the thing and feel the thing in the moment than the construction of the story. That you got to climb the wall and rescue the princess is the point, not what the climbing and rescuing do in narrative structure terms, much less in moral statement terms*.
Then there comes Nar, which is assumed to be about addressing premise. This started off as a very character centered thing – you have a character, that character addresses premise, and through that builds theme and story. However, there is still a degree of essentially experiential creation of story going on in most first and second generation Nar games. That is to say, you now consciously think about the construction of the story, but you still construct it through your character.
Now Vincent, and others, are looking at taking some of that (all of that?) element out: they want you to interface with the construction of the story from an external POV. That is, you do not guide the story through character, you guide the story as an equal teller of the story. The game can have experiential elements to it, of course. Any writer can tell you that it is possible to get very into your own story. However, the point isn’t to “do this guy” or “push this guy” or to “experience this thing” it is, fully, to “tell this story as joint authors not tied to specific character elements.”
Understandably a lot of people have issues with this. It moves the whole “role playing” thing off the table. Really, in a hard-line version of some of the games Vincent is directing his platonic laser-pointer towards there wouldn’t be a huge amount of the experiential, of the playing or experiencing, the characters. It would be about constructing the story, rather than living the story.
Now, one of the reasons this is difficult is that our culture (not just gamers, most normal people too) have a rather odd relationship to story. We can all appreciate a good story, from Shakespeare to Spiderman 2, but we can’t all tell a good story of that type. And it is that last point that is important. Of that type.
Here is something Neel said on anyway:
“The games I run and play in aren’t stories. When we play, me make this gigantic tangled mass of narrative. There’s too much stuff in them to be a story. We make stories out of them, by taking a particular point of view, and highlighting some bits of the mass as important, and sidelining other things.
When you take a point of view to get a slice of the game, you get a story — protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters emerge. However, you can slice a game in multiple ways, and get multiple stories. And in each slice, who the protagonists are is different. All from the same play session.”
That, I think, is the way a lot and a lot of people construct story for their game. It is a perfectly functional mode, and one that can construct story from multiple creative agendas. (Though different creative agendas will result in different ways and power dynamics of how the story is built, the story can still be there in the end.) One of the reasons this works so well is that its what we’ve learned to do over years of gaming: it goes well with the experiential mode and mixes the ability to “be there” and also “tell that” into one activity.
However, I’d say there is another reason that it comes easily to a lot of RPers. While we often lack the ability to tell a crafted story that is built from the ground up in our culture, we are very good at telling “the story of the day.” It’s something that a lot of people, gamers and non are quite good at doing. (It’s also something that many are quite bad at doing – but that’s not surprising. Remember, 90% of everything is crap.)
The “story of the day” is the anecdote, the funny or sad story, the appeal to joint humanity and call for emotional response that has come to dominate the field of oral storytelling in our culture. I’m a big story of the day teller, to the point that my friends, while endlessly entertained, often will turn to my wife and say “and what actually happened?” My semi-infamous Lancaster Saga is a written story of the day cycle. They work better when told orally then written, and have resulted in me having rooms full of people hanging on my every word for hours at a time. I’m a good storyteller, yo.
The thing is though, I’ll tell these stories that I’ve been telling for a while now, and then when I’m done someone who “isn’t a storyteller” and who didn’t practice will often step up and tell a story just about as good as the one I just finished. Shorter, usually, but quite complete as a story and very much in the mode of social-communion that oral storytelling is supposed to fill at the social level. People, normal people, can do this. People, normal people, are good at this. Despite the fact that they suck at trying to write a story or construct a novel.
The reason for this is that there are different skill sets getting applied. When you write a novel in a mode other than the expressionist, you are constructing and deliberately laying out a lot of plot work, a lot of external control, and creation from the substratum. OTOH, when you tell a story of the day you are taking events that really happened and simply making them coherent, taking an angle on them that semi-intuitively builds your narrative pattern based on a naturalistic model. You have too much stuff going on in real life to make a story, so you take a slant on it, highlight the important points, and then build them into a simple narrative. The rhythm of experiential events forms your skeleton, the highlighted events your muscles, and then all you have to do is apply the skin of your angle and intention to get a story.#
If you’re now saying that sounds a lot like what Neel wrote, you get a gold star.
Lots and lots of people can do this. They do it naturally. They do it instinctively. It is part of our cultures heritage of oral storytelling, and so being able to do that in the oral storytelling medium of RPGs only makes sense.
Now, what Vincent is looking to do is to divorce RPGs from that mode and move them more fully into the mode of “constructing a plot from the outside” – which is how most novels and screenplays get written. This will necessitate the development and support of a whole new set of skills, a set of skills that many people don’t have at all. What’s more, doing it collaboratively and as you go will require yet another set of skills – a set that even the great novelists and screenwriters of our day don’t necessarily have. They aren’t doing this real time, they’re able to move back and forth and pre-plan and pre-play as much as they like. We can’t do that, and so have a harder road to hoe.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, I look forward to it. I’m excited by it. I think it can be done, and what’s more will be done. But I do understand how and why people get freaked about it. It is, fundamentally, not the same type of game as those that we’re used to playing and does not tell the type of story that most of us are good at telling.
Hell, it won’t be a type of story that anyone is good at telling. It will require a combination of skills from different areas (impro, dramatic writing, oral storytelling) that are pretty rare. Which just means we need excellent mechanical support to make it go, to give people who are interested tools to build new skills.
And for those who aren’t interested? No worries, and no value judgments. Our societies bourgeois power-discourse value system based on sellability is crap, and there is nothing inherently more valuable or worthy about writing a novel than telling a story of the day. No one is (or should be) saying that one is better than the other. What I am saying is that I like both, and have so far only been able to successfully and repeatedly do one – and I (and others) are now looking for ways to do the other.
Next: Myerrs Briggs game type test.
* Though it is worth noting that John Kim, and others, have pointed out that reflection upon experience based play like this can lead to celebration/reflection/meaning in a way not dissimilar to the anthropological understanding of myth-mysteries, so hey….
# One of the reasons that people who are bad at the story of the day are so bad at it is that they fuck up one of these levels: either they tell you all the details (screwing up the pacing for the whole event), don’t hit the right highlight events, or don’t take any angle on it and just spit out the unexpurgated contents of their minds at you. I leave the conclusions about how this interacts with RPGs and story creation to you.
Personally, I keep getting caught in the trap of answering V’s questions in terms of existing RPGs, rather than potential RPGs.
Once I view “co-ownership” in terms of stuff that could be done but hasn’t yet, I’m all over it.
Nice, Brand. I like. I know that as I said in marginalia to VB’s discussion, I’m increasingly thinking that where I want to get to at the end of all this is not really anything that would be a recognizable “roleplaying game.” Which is not to say that I won’t still play, and enjoy, roleplaying games. It’s just that some portion of the hunger I’m trying to fill by playing isn’t really one that RPGs fill well.
I kind of think that the seeds of this were there right from the start in “Story Now.” If the way we customarily get satisfying story out of events - as you say, the “story of my day” - is to pull it out of the transcript afterward, then first-try Narrativism has mostly been about “how do we get more story-worthy stuff INTO the transcript, and how do we reduce the cruft that it’s buried in?” I think where VB’s going is a logical evolution from that - “can we just strip this process all the way down to the minimum?”
Killing the character is just the next step from killing the GM, which was itself kind of the next step from killing the “rules are the model of the fictional reality” assumption.
Heya,
Nice work Brand. The thing people gotta keep in mind is that Vincent is talking about a very specific kind of game that won’t appeal to everyone who games. And that he isn’t saying that one type of game is superior to another type. It’s simply ONE method of doing things. Not the ONLY method.
Peace,
-Troy
This is really just actual genre emulation by another name. Not the basic stuff, where you incorporate the tropes of this or that type of fiction, but actual emulation. The game play directly approximates the genre, whether it is a novel, a manga, or a poem.
Take a look here for some examples of games that do exactly that.
In particular:
Pure Shoujo emulates shoujo manga as a genre.
In the Box emulates a sort of poetic fiction, derived from the sestina.
Slash-fest emulates the slasher film genre.
All three of these break traditional character and GM structures, as a way to produce the desired genre.
Thanks guys for getting the point about not freaking out. However, that isn’t the interesting point, or the one I’m most wanting to talk about. I want to talk about ways we tell stories, the tools we need to do that, and how we have and will do that in our games. There are different ways of telling story, so how do we make those ways work in game?
For example: Premise was created to lend coherence and authorial ability from a semi-traditional PC stage. By playing to premise you gain the ability to make a coherent story without knowing everything ahead of time. You challenge that point, you respond to that point, and so things build towards an answer of that point. However, even then a lot of what happens can only be seen in retrospect, and not everything that happens in the game will be part of the story (or any individual sub-story).
So, premise is one of the first attempts to make story coherently happen as we play, rather than after we play. As such it did a magnificent job as an organizational and coherence tool. However, alone it still leaves us with experiential play – we simply get directed (self-directed) experiential play.
What other tools do we need in order to move away from the experiential play? For example, what happens when you combine Capes narrative structuring game-mechanics with an explicit address of specific premise that is defined (as a question) before hand? When everyone starts getting story tokens not just on getting others involved in challenges, but on how well those challenges explored the premise of the game as we all see it?
You can already do this in Capes, but what happens when we push it up another notch? When we start playing Capes without focus characters? That one is something you should be able to do easily, but most Capes games I’ve seen AP posts about retain that feature of play despite the fact there is no structural reason to do so. I think part of the reason for that is that we’ve all got lots of training, both by games, story of the day training, and just the naturalistic experience of real life (as well as possible Lacan mirror stage issues) all putting us up to play the focus character as the default for a story. As most superhero comics, books, movies, and games all fall into this mode, it becomes all that much easier to default to it in Capes.
Could aggressive premise push you out of that? Aggressive character co-ownership?
What about things like With Great Power’s “story arc” where there is a defined course of narrative structure events that must happen before the plot can conclude. What happens when you fuse it with Capes? You can’t introduce that conflict now, because the story arc hasn’t been filled to there?
Or when you do it with Dogs? You all make a town partly together, partly apart, and then have a game system that controls who can reveal what and when and to whom. Then take out the Dogs and let the town judge itself.
What concrete mechanisms do we need to make that work? What different sense of story? We all know how to tell story in the traditional mode, and how to assemble story out of events that happened before hand – how do we make games that allow us to consciously make story as we go?
Mendel,
Thanks for the references. I’ll check them out! In the meantime can you give me some discrete examples of how these games create story? How they reaportion credibility and structure and such?
I’ll also note that what I’m talking about it isn’t just genre emulation by another name. That would be one way of doing it — one important way even. However, it is only one way of going about building a story as story.
Interestingly, it looks (from what you’re saying) like the Sim way to break experiential staging, while Vincent and others are focused on the Nar way.
The way I see it, you can’t force the engagement of premise with mechanics. But you can make it very easy to engage. If the mechanics cause players to frequently make premise related decisions, and those decisions have notable consequences, then that premise will be much more likely to become engaged.
As far as examples of that:
Pure Shoujo uses the relationship cards to focus the play on producing the desired set of relationships. Until a card is played a relationship is not set in stone, and both roleplaying techniques and the choice of when to roll and what the outcomes are serve entirely to affect that vote. In essence the relationship vote is a synchronization, ensuring that all the players view the same meaning from the events of play.
To make a game like Pure Shoujo more premise heavy, only a modification of the cards would be required. In a sense, the crux of the game is playing the cards, everything else is simply a way to build enough credibility to do so. And the interplay of the cards themselves can be used to form the story.
On the other hand, In the Box lends itself easily to premise-ful play. Players are encouraged to choose walls, forces, and endings which make the type of game they are interested in, if those are related to a premise, then the story should flow quite naturally, if only from the structure of the sestina.
As far as this being a Sim way to break experiential staging, I would say that is a fairly apt description.
As an addition to a good discussion, let me drop a quote. It’s regarding letting your characters run wild vs. using a premise as a blueprint for writing a story:
“Sure, it’s great to go with the flow of the fantasies and the reverie, but that’s exactly where the problem lies. If you don’t know your premise, your characters *will* write the story, but what story will they write? You might get lucky–it might be a good one.” (James N. Frey, “How to Write a Damn Good Novel II, p. 50.)
However, most of the time, it’s not a very good story that evolves that way. And for those who are more concerned with Being There or Stepping Up, that’s not important. But for those of us who want to put the story front and center, we need to take charge of the characters. That doesn’t mean, as Vincent has pointed out so many times, that we play them unrealistically or capriciously; they still need to be solid characters with good reasons for everything they’re doing.
But maybe it’s time that we let go of our fixation of playing characters, and share the burden of focusing on the story instead. If we’re all locked into our particular characters, then all we really can do is let them write the story. But if we share and all have other influence on the fiction, we can more directly work towards addressing a premise.
Mendel,
Thank you! I will certainly be taking these games out for a test drive as soon as I have time. Sim-breaking the cycle is something I’m very interested in.
Christian,
Yep. In the “old days” I used to have games that went very well, and months at a time where game would be good. But then it would fall apart. When you do things on the fly they can work out sometimes, but the only way to get things to work out all the time (or most of the time) is to think about what you’re doing.
The unexamined game is not worth playing.
I’ll propose Scene Framing as one of those techniques that will be required and which aren’t common. I see a lot of AP reports that ask “what went wrong with this new guy?” which, at least to my perspective, come down to “why can’t New Guy frame a good scene?” Setting up a scene — and setting up a scene directed at a specific target — is not something that has any direct corrolation to the rest of our lives. You only do it in creative endeavors (and perhaps in seating people at the table for a meal or a meeting).
Understanding characters as elements of a story, rather than the story as something that happens to the characters, is probably also up there. Gamer baggage tells us that every character played by a single player is important, and a character without a character sheet is not at all important, regardless of how they’re used in the story. Shock: and FLFS both explicitly label characters as Protagonists/Antagonists/Foils and the like, so we’ll see how that flies. But understanding the role of these story elements is foundational to being able to frame a scene including them.
Me, I’m wondering what the buy-in and investment is. It’s been said before: “take away my character, give me something back.” Getting back “the potential of a story that you will have to endlessly compromise to complete” is not terms I’m interested in. What this embryonic thing needs is a focus, and “story” does not fit the bill.
So if characters are not to be the players’ agents in the SIS, what is?
How is what you wind up with any different than collaborative story-, play-, or novel-writing?
I just want to grab Fred’s questions.
So if characters are not to be the players’ agents in the SIS, what is?
Do we need an agent? Why can’t we just manipulate the fiction directly through narration, using POV as freely as we like? Polaris already operates in 3rd-person past tense, more or less, as an example.
How is what you wind up with any different than collaborative story-, play-, or novel-writing?
Reflexivity (the producers are their own audience) and ephemerality, for two significant qualities.
Reaching back to Mark’s previous post:
I kind of think that the seeds of this were there right from the start in “Story Now.”
YES. That essay and the attendant game-idea marked the moment when I decided to regrow withered/damaged organs and limbs, rather than search for ever-better prosthetics.
Josh,
I’m not sure its a gain/loss situation. I mean, it may start as that, but I think what we’re looking towards in the end isn’t a same thing with elements switched around, its a new thing.
So when we want the things we’ve got now, we can keep them. There will always be baseball. But now we can have hockey too. Sure it has ice rather than grass, but that becomes part of the fun.
Of course, I personally hate hockey, so….
For now, let me turn your (very good) question back on you in an unfair rhetorical way. You’ve said in the past that your “socket” is narrative structure. So, as a narrative structuralist, what things in the way you like to tell stories and play games are not being satisfied by current RPG assumptions? Where does your ability to tell story, or plug into narrative structure, break down under current pardigms?
Give me some ideas on that, and maybe we can work them out.
Heya,
So if characters are not to be the players’ agents in the SIS, what is?
-Minor point, I think that Vincent is talking about the Protagonists not all Characters.
-But anyway, to answer your question, I think people can play the Setting, Villains, Situation, Color, and supporting Characters. This is way outside the box thinking. It might be hard to see it all at once.
Peace,
-Troy
Ron,
Much as I do appreciate that gamers are damaged (I know I am) I have to say that the line you’re taking is one of the reasons people freak out. Maybe it is on purpouse, mabye not.
I just feel compelled to point out that when you make statements like your post above they can be read as a blanket response to the whole experiential vs. constructed angle and sound like you are saying “those who play in an old mode are damaged, this is the one way out.”
I don’t think you’re saying that, but because the metaphor didn’t start here and because we aren’t all intamates of your discussions, it sounds less like you are passionatly arguing for coherence and thought in games, and more for a “one true way to fix ills.”
(And the reason I’m even bothering to point this out is because of the “no one is saying it is bad and should go away completly” part of the initial post. I don’t think Ron is saying that, but can understand how it might sound as though he was. Of course, if you are saying that Ron, let me know and we can have it out.)
Troy:
I’m totally okay with my “role” being something aside from what we traditionally think of as a “character”… when I saw Capes do it I thought that was the greatest idea the game had. I look forward to seeing more designs that do that.
But at the same time, I don’t see that as much of a radical departure from traditional gaming.
I started to put some notes together on what a game that TRULY went out of the box when it comes to agent ownership (where an agent can be a character, or another element of story such as setting, conflict, theme, etc.) and I realized that it was about 70% of the way into collaborative fiction writing, with the missing elements being, as said before, permanence, editing, and intended audience.
In point of fact, I know of at least one collaborative fiction writing project in which the “first draft” is generated in FFRP over chat, and then the resulting logs are heavily edited and converted into prose with the intention of publishing them. This particular project has strong character ownership of some characters and shared ownership of others, but it could easily be imagined that all of the characters could be shared.
Didn’t “Quag Keep” by Andre Norton start off as an RPG? I know for certain that the “Aces and Jokers” series edited by George RR Martin did.
“… a one true way to fix ills …” From me? Strange.
The guy who suggests not playing with people who don’t share your Creative Agenda, at that time and place?
The guy who suggests that gamer culture is not the most productive venue for whatever comes next in the current wave of changes in RPG-ish design?
The guy who offers direct instruction for reconfiguring the social context of one’s hobby-activity?
The guy who almost totally ignores the established economic and social basis for gamer consumerism?
The guy who says, satisfy your own creative desires with your game design, not a mass-concept of “the gamers” out there?
The guy’s whose ideas are routinely pilloried for being “divisive” and sowing “dissent”?
You’re concerned that my words might be read as a solution for everyone? Can’t see where that’s coming from. I shot the sacred cow “solutions for everyone” a long time ago. I even rubbed people’s faces in its blood.
People aren’t mad because they think I’m offering them a one-way solution. They’re mad because they feel ignored, abandoned, and insulted. (Of course, they already felt that way as a chronic condition, so whatever.)
I’ll tell you what I am suggesting, because it’s what I’ve been doing publicly for six to eight years: triage. Work with, listen to, help, learn from, and cooperate with those who want to, and who can. Those who do not want to, and cannot, well, no solution.
You know, asusual, not one person who has reacted strongly to my comment on Vincent’s blog has actually contacted me for any form of clarification, or with any desire for reaching understanding.
That leads me to be unsympathetic for your concern for how “others” may react. If you want to know what I’m on about, Brand, just get in touch.
That said, I respect your desire for me not to post here about the topic, and I won’t.
Ron,
You’re taking me the wrong way man. I do want you to talk about it and respond, and I don’t think you’re a one true way guy.
I do, however, see how some people can get that impression if they don’t know you. I wasn’t really trying to smack you in the mouth, I was trying to point out the way that your statement didn’t contradict my statement — even if it might on first blush have sounded like it did.
As for people contacting you, I don’t have a problem talking to you mate — but you’re an intimidating guy, and I think a lot of people are afraid of you. That makes it hard for them to talk reasonably, especially when they’re in the midst of a healing transition anyway.
I was trying to even out that bump, and now seem to have irked you. So perhaps I should just let it go now.
Brand, you asked for specific techniques. Good question. We’ve got story stakes (a la Capes, Shock & Under the Bed), and scene framing (truly powerful such as when used collaboratively in PtA).
Directed emergent story techniques is what I’d point to next–for example, creating cues and connections between characters and setting elements that help the players bring the narrative flow without having to script action before hand. Issues in PtA function this way, though within the framework of TV. Narrativist games have a lot of clues & flags for communication between player & gm, and what we could use would be similar ones for inter-player work.
Falling Leaves is a good game to look at for an example of a game the changes the way we look at how a story can be generated.
Emily,
Thanks! I will check Falling Leaves out, and then stew on things for a bit.
Complex answer to an unfair question:
I like to dicker with narrative structure, sure. To do this I need means by which I can make statements about the fiction and its structure that other players will ratify. In traditional games, most of those means are connected to my “player character” which is, I admit, the tool equivalent of a very blunt spoon. If I no longer have my blunt-spoon character and no longer get to try and steer the game through my control of that character’s actions, what do I have instead to try and effect my desires?
Josh,
You can still have characters, they just might not be “your” character. Capes does this already, but it’s just a start.
You might have direct currency based access to the narrative structure, setting, or plot in a direct way. Universalis does this already, but it’s just a start.
So what if I trade you a “my guy” for a “cast of 1000s” and a “protagonist” for a “setting custom tailored on the fly” just to start with?
Any blings?
For my own part, whether or not I like trading in “my guy” for something else would depend a great deal on what the something else was.
Brand, this may be irrelevant to your central point (and I’d post it over on Anyway instead if that thread weren’t on hiatus), but I think you are mistaken on what Vincent was proposing. I think that Vincent is proposing story creation within a fully experiential mode, just working to incorporate better methods of creating story. Note, for instance, that Vincent is talking about shared ownership of each person’s character, not equally shared ownership of all of the characters. He envisions something in which you still have an I-guy to experience the game world through, but that that I-guy no longer needs to be the protagonist to be interesting, because the player has methods other than their I-guy of staying fully participatory. This makes a better story, as there are very few good stories that have a half dozen protagonists. Likewise, I don’t think that the alternate paths of participating in the story that Vincent envisions are top-down literary techniques (or, no more so than already exist in games like DitV). Vincent advocated the idea of playing where you don’t know if your character is the protagonist, the antagonist or supporting cast until it happens in play. That is actually further from current top-down techniques in the direction of experiential mode.
Shared-cast, literary-mode games already exist. It seems to me that Vincent is proposing incorporating the techniques that those games reveal back into experiential mode games (just as DitV incorporates the lessons of GMless/ful games back into a GM’d structure). Anyway, that is how I read him.
This last bit is probably totally irrelevant to your post, but I think that it is actually this hybridization that Vincent proposed that draws the stronger negative response. People who are comfortable with the idea of Capes or Universalis, where fully shared character ownership is a given, may still find it threatening or confusing to hear it suggested that the character they own in an “each player has a character” game is not actually their character, but is everyone’s to mess with, and that furthermore, they will have no promise that their character will be important to the story. I think it is easier to step outside the box of character ownership altogether than it is to keep the concept of character ownership, but radically adjust what it means.
Fred, does that sound right to you? You reacted fairly negatively to Vincent’s ideas, but have commented here (and elsewhere) that you find Capes cool, so I think your position matches the response I’m describing.
“People who are comfortable with the idea of Capes or Universalis, where fully shared character ownership is a given, may still find it threatening or confusing to hear it suggested that the character they own in an “each player has a character” game is not actually their character, but is everyone’s to mess with, and that furthermore, they will have no promise that their character will be important to the story.”
Yes, I’d say that’s accurate.
Interestingly, what you’re talking about is happening in the Nine Worlds game I’m in over Skype. The narrative structure of 9W closely matches Capes, in that if you win the conflict, you narrate achieving the stakes, and if you lose, you get nothing. It’s impossible to win one of those conflicts without taking narrative control of the losing character as well as the winning one.
When I discovered this, I immediately went looking for something to mitigate it. We had several discussions about narration and its limits during the course of the game. I needed something to push the game back in the direction of ownership.
What I found was the “Don’t Be An Ass” social contract rule. The Rules-as-written rules state that the winner can narrate whatever he wants, but the “DBAA” rule mitigates the damage that this narration can do to a character.
If Thomas had narrated something that violated my sense of ownership too badly (such as ‘revealing’ that my character was actually a woman in disguise - which would have destroyed what I wanted to do) then I would have had no recourse in the context of the 9w rules to prevent it. I’d probably have said something like “Thomas, I’m really surprised at you. I didn’t think you were that kind of gamer. If you’re not going to take that back, then I really don’t think we can play together.”
I’ve got more to say on this topic, but I think this is enough for a blog comment… possibly too much.
There is always a mass of narrative when you combine setting and situation (in the broader sense). When I write novels, this the order I take: setting + situation + character = narrative goo. However, the art of writing the novel is sifting through and finding the gems in the goo.
This, to me, is what Story Now is trying to do preemptively. You’re using the same tool (premise/theme/whatever) as an author would to find those goo gems.
So, different protagonists and viewpoints change the narrative. (Trust me, I just excised a character while rewriting my first novel. Changes everything.) And each player plays a different protagonist. Different VPs. The players are aware of the others, but thinking back on it and reacting to it (making decisions) they will each create separate stories from those of their companions.
So . . .
Group 1 plays in a traditional way. There is one basic story structure going on but with four different players it becomes four different perceived narratives.
Group 2 plays in the manner in which we are discussing. Equally shared protagonists, antagonists, setting, and so forth. This creates one narrative with differences in perception based solely on personal reflection. Everyone gets the same story experience.
It’s Hive-Mind Story Now. Not each player authors a story based on his character, but we all author a story. Like writing, acting in, directing, and watching a film all at once.
That’s what we are talking about, right?
Story Now says: Before the act of playing, we are going to set things up to get those good narrative moments. Then this says, “Yes, and we are all going to get the same take and experience.”
I’m not sure I had a point with any of that. I’m just trying to think through it.
Oh, and I think the problem people have with accepting the idea that you already share your character in existing games is not the concept but that it’s a threat against (typically) shaky social contracts in games that don’t even take such things into consideration.
Charles,
You are right about the specifics of what Vincent is now talking about. However, I’m talking about underlying rhetorical and logical structure — in which the movement towards shared character control acts as a pointer towards different ways of telling stories.
I also think you’re right that a lot of the problem comes from “crossing the streams.” If you’re telling a story, you’re fine. If you’re playing a character, you’re fine. Its when you try to do both at the same time that things get sticky.
Not impossible. Just sticky. Because we have to learn new skills to do it.
I agree agree agree with Charles S! If I’d been after nobody-owns-a-character, I’d'a been all over talking about Capes and Universalis, instead of going “meh” to them.
Vincent,
Good to know.
So how do we cross the streams and not fuck it up?
More to come….
Eventually.
Before the act of playing, we are going to set things up to get those good narrative moments. Then this says, “Yes, and we are all going to get the same take and experience.”
This is a wild goose chase. One phenomenon + five spectators = at least five experiences. This is why “what if I find out later that I’m not the protagonist” is a silly proposition, because it assumes that there is one protagonist and one story. With multiple players at the table, there will be multiple takes on it. Defining things based off of the “real” story just ain’t gonna work (much like basing things off the SIS, which also doesn’t exist).
This is why “what if I find out later that I’m not the protagonist” is a silly proposition, because it assumes that there is one protagonist and one story.
Joshua, I don’t see how this holds water. You could design a game in such a way that some player characters turn out not to be protagonists, right? That’s all that is needed to make the proposition non-silly. Surely such design is possible.
Victor, I think what Joshua is saying is that it’s always possible for you to look at Hamlet and see Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead.
I played in a game where, up-front, we designated one PC the protagonist and designed all of the others as supporting cast and the GM structured situations to push the protagonist-PC into the central role. If you look at the narrative we produced from a structural perspective, you could probably easily figure all this stuff out.
But: Rosencrantz and Guilderstern. “The Story” depends on the individual’s response to the narrative, and when you play a character you can get a really powerful emotional response, which means that you can have the genre-understanding, rational, pattern-matching part of your brain telling you one thing is “the story”, and your heart and your gut and your feelings telling you something completely different is “the story”.
This is completely awesome. Hamlet is a work of genius because it’s able to be a perfect genre tale (revenge tragedy) and a totally different story at the same time. The thought of using a roleplaying game to do Hamlet and Rashomon at the same time literally gives me shivers. Like, wow.