Narrativism
I was trying to read Ron Edwards’ essay, Narrativism: Story Now at The Forge this morning.
I’d love for this post to be a carefully reasoned critique of Edwards’ ideas, but alas, it is not to be. The man writes like Immanuel Kant: full of technical-sounding jargon and unnecessary elaborations that have the effect of leaving the reader sure he read something interesting, but not sure what that something was.
So I can’t form a coherent judgement of the content of the article. A suggestion for Mr. Edwards: try an abstract, try the 10% Rule, and grab a copy of Strunk and White.
I can get a sense of the point of the article, though. What is Narrativist gaming? I think of myself as a Narrativist (as opposed to a Simulationist or a Gamist), so it would be nice if I could define that term to my satisfaction.
Chrysoula has been talking to me lately about story structure. It is tempting, as a reader, to believe that novels fall from the sky, alien artifacts fully formed and ready for use. We describe good novels as ‘page-turners’, and we talk of being ’swept up’ in the story. What is revealed by these descriptions is that we don’t usually think of how stories are built. We don’t think about the girders and concrete that form the story’s foundation. We’re focused on the color of the curtains, or the style of artwork on the walls.
They are built, though. I don’t want to elaborate on the Three Act Structure here; Google it and you’ll find a thousands sites explaining it. Similarly, there’s a school of thought which believes every scene should end in disaster for the protagonist; the arguments for this structure are (to me, at least) pretty persuasive.
Stories, then, are constructed. ‘Toss some characters in a situation and see what develops’ isn’t going to generate a great story. It’s going to generate a story, sure, but not one that’s as compelling as a well-constructed novel.
The tradeoff in gaming has always been understood as: You will get a crappier story than a good novel, but it will be interactive. Players are never going to be as cool as the protagonists of a novel, but it will be as enjoyable as a novel because the players are controlling the protagonists of the game.
I assert (and here I’m getting to my definition of Narrativism) that this is a false tradeoff. I believe games can have stories that are just as good as a good novel. There’s no reason the medium of gaming should be less able to construct narratives that compel an outside observer just as much as they compel a participant.
A summary statement of my ideal Narrative game: When we’re done playing, people should enjoy telling the story of the game, and non-participants without gaming context should enjoy hearing the story of the game.
My ultimate goal in running games is to create an interactive experience that is as good as a novel. I want to be able to later relate the story of the game, and have a listener not realize I’m talking about a game. I want them to believe the game could have been a movie, or a novel.
What this means is that rather than define modes of interaction between gamemasters and players, and construct a bizarro edifice of specialized jargon to describe the levels of interaction between participants and stories, I want to think about structure.
Edwards seems to think a lot about RPGs, and not as much about stories. I expected, right at the top of his essay, in bold: ‘How to use the Three Act Structure in a game’, and a whole lot of followup discussion about what works in traditional written narratives, and how it can be imported to gaming.
Instead he spins off into what reads like a very insular, introverted discussion of what’s been tried in RPGs to date, what RPG authors are thinking about, how different RPGs are presenting narrative, and what seems to work and what seems to fail. All of which is perfectly legitimate, and completely ignores the elephant in the room: the modern novel, the modern film, the modern short story.
Narration isn’t a mystery. People are succeeding at narrating every single day. Your local bookstore is overflowing with successful narratives. Your local theater is showing narratives in Dolby Digital Surround. This isn’t rocket science. It’s well-understood and a part of mainstream culture.
And any discussion of narration in games that doesn’t start with a careful look at how narration works in other media is, in the end, so much navel gazing.
So this isn’t just a rant, I’ll present my current thinking about where to start with game narration: How can I give the players the freedom to direct their characters in each game session, so that they believe they are sovereign agents, and still cause a three-act structure to take shape? I believe it’s possible; making it happen in whatever crude form is my next step.
Some techniques I’m considering:
- Work with players to construct characters who will, by design, have a stake in the events of the story.
- Build flexibility into the story so that multiple outcomes will all serve the story’s purpose. For instance, if Act 2 must end in disaster, plan for multiple disasters.
- Improvise within an established framework. It’s important to know where the story is headed, in order to create the act structure, but the route by which one arrives at the destination does not need to be fixed.
- Plan for kinds of checkpoints, rather than specific events. The GM, acting as a director and guide, can bring any series of events to a certain kind of checkpoint. If that checkpoint is the right sort of event to drive the narrative, it will work in the act structure, regardless of the specifics. If the story demands ‘reversal of fortune; villains triumph’, improvisation should be able to bring that about without forcing the players into a required ‘boss fight’ or compelling them to walk down a certain street at a certain time.
- Think about, and construct for, pacing. This is my problem with Simulationist gaming. Good stories are well-paced. Call of Cthulhu games rarely are. I think this comes from demanding the plot progress according to a pre-planned series of events. Improvisation should be able to pace a game just like a movie or a novel.
Those are just starting points for planning and constructing, but they give a sense of what I think a good approach to Narrativism looks like.
February 16th, 2005 at 6:12 pm
Personally, I think of myself as a Simulationist.
What amused me about that article is that it’s very clear that he thinks we’ve labelled ourselves backwards; that he would consider you a strong Simulationist, where “the story heard by people after the game” is setting the boundaries and rules for the simulation, and he would consider me a Narrativist, where the narrative is “I have a vision of who this character is; I want to see how she responds to choices that test what that means.”
I think his definitions are in some sense backwards, and I think so are ours, so I haven’t decided yet what to think about it.
February 16th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
That said, I think he thinks that stories are character-driven rather than plot-driven, while both of us are in the unenviable position—
Given that the one thing he said that rang true to me was the comment on the Impossible Thing, “The GM tells the story, but the players control the protagonists”—
Of thinking that it’s ‘both’.
So I think he may mean either ‘weak GM+rules’ or ‘character-focused’ or both by Narrativist, rather than “focused on telling a story”, and either ’strong GM+rules’ or ‘plot-focused’ rather than “focused on emulation” by Simulationist.
This would be very confusing and weird, if so, but I think it’s also a lens by which a lot of his comments start making some sense to me. His essay on Narrativism isn’t about how to tell a story; it’s about what to do when you have bitchy players who want the story to be about their characters. His essay on Simulationism isn’t about how to create a realistic world; it’s about how to create a world that’s intrinsically enjoyable to explore, regardless of how the characters do it, and regardless of whether that exploration is in the Three Act or the Wander Through Dungeons style.
February 16th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
I guess the problem I have with that is that I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘character-driven stories’. I think that there can be plots which get their impetus from the characters, which is a slightly different thing. That is, I think that the plot can be entirely derived from who the character is, but I don’t think that turning a character loose in an environment, or closely examining a character as still-life, is a ’story’ in any useful entertainment-oriented sense of the word.
‘Character studies’ are deathly dull as fiction. Without conflict, a story is just a lot of verbiage. And I think, based on talking to Soula, that there are right and wrong ways to introduce conflict.
That said, I think that the definitions you offer for his view of Simulationist vs. Narrativist are… pretty useless. I can claim, using them, that any style of game is a Simulation. I can turn around and claim that any style of game is a Narration. By subverting the apparent meanings of the words, he’s sabotaged any utility I might have drawn out of his ideas.
But now I have to go home, and can’t elaborate further.
February 16th, 2005 at 8:03 pm
Hm!
Now *we’re* getting lost in terminology.
When I say character-driven story, I mean a story where the characters’ choices, changes, and nature are core to what happens.
You are giving me very little credit here. ^_^
February 16th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
I was actually trying to indicate that I don’t see a real distinction between ‘plot from characters’ and ‘plot by design.’ They’re both plots. Which means it’s hard for me to parse one as ‘narrativist’ and one as ‘not narrativist’. If there’s a narrative, it’s narrativist, wherever that narrative comes from.
That said, I still don’t believe characters are capable of generating their own plot. Good plot always seems to come from the conflict between what a character wants, and the forces preventing the character from getting what she wants.
In my little paradigm, the GM side of the GM/Player axis is when ‘what the character wants’ comes from the GM creating some things she believes the PCs will want. ‘Save the world’ is easy, because almost all PCs want the world to be saved. ‘End slavery in fantasy kingdom’ is also pretty easy. More complicated GM-directed wants can arise from the GM looking at what kinds of characters exist in the game, and building from there, or from building a lot of different potential ‘wants’ and letting the players choose between them. (The latter, incidentally, was what I was trying to do in Frosthold.)
The player end of that axis is (to me) the players explain what their characters want, and the GM responds to those wants with obstacles. Or, in a freeform enough game, the other players respond with obstacles.
My preference for GM-driven obstacle generation aside, I think both these styles of game fall under ‘Narrativist’, in the only sense I can parse that word: There is a strong narrative, and that plot structure is the point of the game, whatever its origin.
Just so I’m using all my terms in the sense I mean them:
Simulationist: Create an environment in which the players can pursue whatever occurs to them. No attempt made to shape the ensuing events into a ’story’. This game is more like the actual flow of real-world history, in that any sense of a narrative is applied after the fact, in interpretation. The environment is the final arbiter of the course of the game.
Gamist: Create a series of challenges to be overcome. The only story is that implied by the nature of the challenges. Combat-focused games are Gamist, because combat is a tactical puzzle to be solved. IF games are usually gamist; the point of the game is to find the correct path through the interface to the ‘win’ text. The classic trap-dungeon, Tomb of Horrors, is the purest example of Gamist D&D.
That’s how I’m using the terms, anyway. I feel like redefining them to mean counterintuitive things is kind of weird, like trying to fit a carton’s worth of milk into screw-top Smucker’s jars. Sure, you can do it, but why?
February 16th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Okay, I have stuff to think about and respond to now.
Kevin said: “That said, I still don’t believe characters are capable of generating their own plot. Good plot always seems to come from the conflict between what a character wants, and the forces preventing the character from getting what she wants.”
I say: Characters are not capable of generating their own plot, sure. But players are, certainly. Theoretically. (That means, some players can, and some players can’t. It requires distance from the character.) Now, the tricky part is, players are capable of creating a narrative (conflict-driven) plot in any kind of gaming model…. but it can only be sustained and turned into an actual story with support from another person. Traditionally, a GM. So, I think it’s worth noting the difference between ‘character-driven’ and ‘player-driven’ and ‘gm-driven’, in terms of narrative.
I think you get character-driven games when somebody wants to pretend to be somebody in the game, without any real planning for how the character will grow and respond to challenges. They might grow and respond to challenges, but there will probably not be any kind of unifying theme behind the choices and growth. Avoiding things that make the character stretch is fairly important to maintaining the immersive illusion and fun factor.
‘Player-driven games’ come when the character is very distinct from the player. The character may actively want one thing while the player wants something else. At some point, the player and the GM must have a shared understanding of the general theme and one-sentence plot of the character’s story, though this doesn’t have to be true from the get-go (as long as the GM knows what kind of game he’s in). A GM supporting this kind of story must be pretty reliant on the player driving the character to face challenges the GM responds in ways that support the story they’re trying to tell. The player is reliant on the GM to provide appropriate challenges and interesting and unexpected twists. This kind of interaction is probably not very fun in a tabletop game with other players present.
‘GM-driven plots’ are like plug-ins. They may or may not hook into a character background, but if they do, the character background was probably just a jumping off point. The GM generally presents situations where the ‘plot-advancing’ action is the obvious one. Characters may react and grow in response to the events of the story, but if they remain mostly static, that’s ok. The plot comes to them, and will bring the needed changes to make it a good story with it.
one last comment, a fine detail on ‘conflict’ that I thought was worth pointing out:
‘Save the world’ is easy, because almost all PCs want the world to be saved.’
but they may not want to do it themselves. this can matter depending on the kind of story origin you have.
February 16th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
It should be worth noting that I can’t read through most of Ron Edwards’ essays yet either. I’m certainly not endorsing them! I only started reading them myself because the Forge is going away sometime and I thought, “I should go there and read stuff to minimize wheel-reinvention risk.”
I think that the GNS terms are bad, because no one quite understands them as anyone else does. ^_^ Except maybe “Gamist.”
I think that your definitions are perfectly good, and that even if there’s some hidden problem with them that necessitated alternate Forge definitions, it’s a problem that the Forge should have fixed with *accessible* alternate terms. ^_^
Hm.
One of the ways in which we differ in our fundamental approach to plotting is that I think that it’s not just character vs. obstacle that’s interesting—it’s also character vs. self. In short, I find ‘you can do this, or this, and whichever way you go you lose something and win something’ at least as interesting as ‘you can do this, but there is a struggle you must undertake.’
This is actually pretty difficult to achieve in a game. For example, in heroic D&D, you’re going to have characters racing each other to take the ‘heroic’ choice. This makes heroic choices pretty much uninteresting, narratively. In D&D, it’s hard to even have a ’save one human or ten goblin children’ heroic choice, because it’s a genre where the usual answer is ‘both, darn it’. (See: Spider-Man, the Movie.) For Valya, though not for most of the party, there’s some room for ‘comfort the dying in their last hours or go fight to try to make it one hour longer’, but it depends on having it be pretty clear that they’re not savable, which was a kind of plot that’s rare in D&D. And for everyone, of course, there’s religious choices and romantic choices and stuff where D&D stays its hand. Part of the problem with this is that it’s spotlight-eating if one person makes the choice and party-debate-ish if everyone does. Games like Buffy and Prime Time Adventures work around this by specifically focusing on how to balance the splotlight issues this raises.
It’s telling, I admit, that most of the choices in what I write are invisible—I don’t like writing about people agonizing, I just like writing about consequences.
And I also love Harlan Ellison’s “Susan,” which is currently available online somewhere with his permission, which is admittedly just a character study in the sense you described above.
Regarding Soula’s post, I tend to think of people—perhaps because of my own issues—*as* plots. I mean, seriously, I think of myself as the ongoing process of resolution of decisions made a long time ago, and I regularly think about what portions of this unfolding development would be worth including in fiction of various forms. I don’t inherently have a good model for other people, but I innately assume, barring evidence for the contrary, that it’s true for them, too. Every character *is* a story, to me, because story is at its core to me about consequences, not actions. For clarity, though, I’ll describe my reactions to your work—when I say that Shadows on the Mirror is brilliant, I’m not saying that you constructed a set of interesting stories from the characters. I’m saying that you wrote characters whose stories are inherently interesting. What Enra has to deal with, and how she does so, is interesting. What Galen has to deal with, and how he will do so, is interesting. How their motives change and the challenges they have to face based on meeting one another—inherently interesting.
There are some stories that are derived from Enra and Galen that I consider more satisfying than others. But I think of that as a matter of craft—mostly on your part, although the player has to find them—not of raw narrative potential. The stories are in *them*. Finding the right one to tell is about quality of storytelling, not presence of it. In a real way, I think that’s what I want the GM and rules set to do—find the great story there. I want the GM to be the one who sees the sheer beauty of, “So, Enra’s grandfather sends Galen to get her, and she autosucceeds on a certain ’sense occult’ check . . .”
Jenna
February 16th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
One of the few really cool things in that essay was the note on samurai: in one kind of game, whatever you call it, being a samurai is part of the game contract. Either the player is asking the GM to treat them as a samurai, or the player is promising the gm to behave in a samurai fashion. In another kind of game, “I am a samurai” is a ticking time bomb: when is the character going to have to break the code of bushido, and for what? This can also be player- or GM-driven, although it works better when it’s player-driven with GM cooperation or GM-driven with LOTS of player trust and/or prearrangement.
That was really the only interesting thing I got out of the essay, but it was really interesting to me.
February 16th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
Slight rephrase: the other half of the ticking time bomb is, “If the character does stay true to bushido, how much will it cost?”
Which suggests that every character should have at least two motivations in a ticking-time-bomb scenario, because those stories are good too.
February 16th, 2005 at 10:31 pm
Also, coming back to the original post, I think you should also carefully consider techniques that delimit the characters’ sovereign agency, rather than just illusions for it.
Extreme cases of this include “you are here to do this in this scene. Do it with whatever flair you want, but you’re here to do this.”
And the equally extreme but insanely player-involved version:
Q: “what are you generally in the game for?”
A: “blah.”
(Later)
Q: “Okay. Here’s something I’ll be wanting to do. How would you generally go about it?”
A: “blah”
Followed by the above.
Q: …
A: “I want to be a psychopathic killer.”
Q: *sweatdrop*
Q: “Okay, in the first session, we’re going to have the scene where you resolve not to kill the other PCs psychopathically. How does that happen?”
A: “I never kill anyone if I know their names.”
(discussions with other players)
Q: “Okay, in this scene, they’re going to introduce themselves. You’re going to hold back on killing them all for some reason or other until it happens. Up to you what your exact reason is.”
This isn’t a recommendation, incidentally, although it’s similar to some things I do like doing. It’s just an illustration of how an extreme of limiting sovereign agency works with no player participation or lots of player participation.
It’s why pregens sometimes work, and why I think Soula sometimes talks about the Tao of D&D—it’s sometimes easier to enjoy your sovereign agency if you know its limits than if you pretend it doesn’t have them. It’s sometimes harder, too, but hey.
Jenna
February 16th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
(Technically, you’ve already started thinking about this—c.f. the Ocean’s 11 post. But I wanted to mention, because you didn’t mention it on your list of techniques. Many players, I think, are more concerned about getting to succeed at their schtick than actually having moment-to-moment control over their character—people playing Jackie Chan often want to describe the ladder fight, not maneuver their characters to a ladder through a series of in-character GM-less decisions. Similarly, if I’m playing Ranma, I often care a lot more about getting a “5 minute warning to water” than about a 50% chance to dodge water. I think someone who wants a strong game plot can take huge advantage of this, but I’ve only run the one experiment and while it succeeded, I’d need to run more to know if it was a fluke.)
February 16th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
These comments are all good stuff. The Forge is going away? Alas, I hardly knew ye — and I can’t imagine someone, somewhere, won’t mirror their stuff. Although it seems odd that, in this day and age (of cheap bandwidth and cheaper storage), that any website would ‘go away’. Heck, even my brother’s 6-years-defunct Bauhaus fan page is still around, update-free and happy to stagnate.
Anyway, yeah, I didn’t want to bring the O11 idea into the conversation because I’m not sure if it’s a narrative or simulation or game. It feels like some of all of those, and I could make an argument that it’s any of the three. Seems too complicated. I’ll just set it aside.
Some of what you talk about sounds a lot like an approach I frequently take towards player group cohesion, with only mixed results at best. I say, ‘Your characters already know each other. You tell me why.’ I’m sort of hoping for interesting relationships, because I’ve found that I can get players to talk to *me* easily, but it’s like pulling teeth to get them to talk to one another. Usually, though, I get, ‘Um, we adventured together before.’ Similarly, I’ll often start off with ‘Ok, you find yourself out on the town. Why? Where are you headed, and what will you do when you get there?’ — and this is generally a total stumper.
I want to, for instance, say to myself: ‘Ok, this scene is going to be where I reveal that there’s a conspiracy in the city that’s up to no good. So I need the player to be out in the city doing something, and whatever that something is, the evil conspiracy will interfere with it in some way, which only shows just how evil they really are.’ That’s the kind of plot structure I’m imagining in point… uh, four of my list in the post. ‘You tell me what’s interesting to you; I’ll adapt my plot flow to be about that thing.’ But my experience has generally been negative when I’ve tried to do this; I can’t get anything more than, ‘I guess I’m going to, I dunno. I’m going out to get a burger.’
I could make it explicit what I want, I suppose, Mad Libs style. ‘Ok, tell me some place in the city your character thinks is important, and values.’ But this runs the risk of being gamed by players; also, it causes me, at least, to leap way out of story headspace and into meta headspace. I don’t like going meta while acting as Lead Narrator, because it breaks my rhythm, and because it feels like a magician showing how the trick was done.
Regarding characters as stories: I agree that every character’s path through life can, if cast in the right framework, be a good story. There are two problems with that as game material, and either may be perfectly surmountable. One, that tends to work best when the world can respond to, support, and reinforce the character’s personal narrative, and that means screen-time, and that means spending some amount of time excluding other players. (Surmount idea 1: it’s easy to fix this in a PBEM.) Two, it requires that the other narrator — the GM, generally — know in advance what that story looks like, so he knows where to support it, where to make use of it, when to center-stage it, and which actions are part of that story (and to what degree they’re part of that story). I’ve often found out much later that a player was trying to do some freaky personal plot in a game I ran, and I never knew about it because the player never told me. It’s great to surprise your fellow players, or to surprise NPCs, with your personal plot twist. Surprising the GM generally just doesn’t work. (Surmount idea 2: have a seperate line of communication from the game — mush, email, IM, whatever — that’s the ‘Meta Channel’ for planning personal plot stages. Never the two shall meet, but it serves as the backdoor into the GM’s narrative structure.)
This has all made me want to put together a PBEM. I will think about that, and see what occurs to me.
February 16th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
Hmmm.
I think that when I’ve discussed Tao of gaming before, it was connected to what I describe as the ‘gm-driven’ kind of plot above: trusting the GM’s story to flow through you, and trusting the GM that the obvious decision is also the right one. But it’s been a while since I used the term, so I’m not sure.
On Shadows… I wrote it before I really grasped structure of a story OR a game. I think I’m pretty good at characterization: at creating characters with interesting issues and quirks and reactions that make them feel real. I suspect that’s most of what you appreciated.
Looking back on the writing process now is interesting. A couple of things stand out. One of them is what I learned shortly after the competition: few people who were beta testers saw much of that characterization because it was poorly structured as a game. But I don’t think game structure relates here at all, except for gamist games, so I’ll save that for another post (ooh, maybe that could be something /I/ could post on Elements). But the other thing that I’m thinking about is…. I created these characters, and I put them in a moment of tension. From a story perspective, they were at the end of Act 2. From a scene perspective, I wrote conversation topics and threads until an endgame was triggered. Usually that endgame topic prompted a moment of crisis or high tension that was followed by purely narrative resolution. The more relaxed resolutions did not work as well as a /story/, rather than a scene of an ongoing story (which was also okay, in the context I was writing it). Not for me, anyhow. I understand a lot better now why that is.
Earlier tonight, while working on character disasters for my experimental project, I found myself thinking about what the difference between ‘life’ and ’story’ was. I think in ‘life’, a lot of things happen the way we want them to. (I believe this is probably more true for most people than for you.) The ’stories’ come from attaching a beginning and an end to a rising struggle against events that are not going the way we want them to. sometimes we surmount or endure that opposition, and sometimes we change our goals as a result. What springs to mind is Stacy’s daily drive home against horrible traffic. That is surely not going the way she wants it to. Given a beginning point and a resolution, that could be a story. Without it, it’s just life. Because we experience all of life, it’s very hard to figure out what to tell the real life stories about. The people who can IMPRESS ME SO MUCH.
(aside: there are other technical elements of a story, supposedly. action and consequence, personal growth, the resolution being related to the events rather than coming out of left field, but some of that is constructed and infused. I could make your desire for change for the last few years into a story, but I’d have to use various tools to draw clear lines between your benefactor’s decision to help you and your own choices and reactions throughout the years. Without those clear lines drawn, it’s just a sequence of events that lacks the oomph of a /story/.)
(Now I am thinking about your story about the ‘worst possible experience’. That was a three act/rising disaster-conflict story. It really worked, in its compressed form. But I’ve kind of gotten off the subject of narrative in game snow. So I’ll just ’say it!’ sorry if I’m incoherent.)
February 16th, 2005 at 11:56 pm
To Isildur’s comment on characters as stories: since it isn’t something you like to think about and I do, I want to point out that I don’t think it /works/ to discuss, in detail, what a story is going to contain in advance. I’m still working out the words for why, but it has something to do with the fact that it IS supposed to be an immersive game experience, and not just a group storytelling session. Knowing the details of what’s coming ruins the fun. A broad, one line plot seems about right. I really think there’s no way to systemize that kind of thing, though, because it’s so open to player abuse. But I’m fairly anti-system in general. So!
It’s midnight, so more later, maybe.
February 17th, 2005 at 1:05 am
Re: the Forge
Yah. They’re shutting down at some point in the indefinite future. Deliberately. (I don’t know the background, but it reads as either a ‘project over, time for new hands’ or ’snit over something.’ Probably the former, maybe the latter.) I’m sure that the best stuff will remain easy to find, but, you know how it is. I hate missing opportunities, so I’m trying not to!
Re: pulling teeth
Yah. I think this accurately identifies the challenge that this technique has to face.
I think that it’s possible to have enough synchronization to make this work, and that there’s jus a step missing somewhere. I don’t know where it is, but the place I’m going to look for it—if I keep thinking about it—is inside my own writing process. What is the coalescent point of information and structure in my head that makes it obvious to me what interesting things characters can do? It’s a lot less than the whole story, and a lot more than “so, there’s a town.”
I think my Big Theory is that there is a way to express character and scene goals that makes this easier, and that there is some kind of expectation setting that can work too.
For example, “what do you do in this city?” produces a very different range of answers in me based on how much scene control I have. Let’s take an idealized Valya, who answers: “I’m opening the heart of a skinflint miser who’s foreclosing on an orphanage by reminding him of the days that he loved the dawn instead of gold.”
Why don’t I say that in the game? Usually, because I’m too busy thinking about what I’m supposed to say, and figuring that if I say a plot, then I’m stepping on toes, but if I’m not in a plot, then I’m wandering through a city that’s ill-defined in my head.
I *think* that the meeting point of these two strategies is where I say that and you say, “Um, no, that doesn’t work, but you can be doing something *like* that. Let me think.”
And eventually, I learn exactly how many details to give so that you start saying, “Ah, yes, you mean place X and thing Y and action Z” instead of “that doesn’t work” and making me feel guilty and horrible because people can guilt me very easily; and I’m not just guilty about not knowing your city but also about what all the other PCs are doing and maybe they know what they’re supposed to do.
Anyway, that’s my ideal, for the strong-GM case—having the presence of mind to answer with a plot, and having the GM give me the closest working thing available. It’s difficult, but it’s why I keep coming back to scene framing and character arcs and stuff. If I have a character arc, then I just reference it against my character image and the game location and I’m good to spin off something great.
It’s possible that I’m a freak in that this would be necessary, and it’s possible that I’m a freak in that it would be possible. I get the impression that a lot of the constraints that I want are things that are painful to other kinds of players, and vice versa.
I suspect, anyway, that “genre and one-line plot summary” is all you need before the game, plus a talk with the GM about the character, but that you need it again each scene in microcosm—the genre and one-line summary of the scene, and *maybe* a much shorter talk with the GM. That’s just where my mind goes, though. Like I’ve said, I tried this once and it was cool, but I don’t know how much it was cool because ‘hey, Jenna’s running something for once and it doesn’t suck’ as opposed to my actual ideas working.
Re: player abuse . . .
Hm!
It depends on the group. I know that when I’m talking to this crowd, everything I say about gaming has an implicit test of “so, what happens when there are 40 people in a LARP?”
I wrote rules for that once. People keep saying they’d be better tabletop rules, and the main book rules better for LARP, so clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about LARPwise and until the unlikely event of having an interest in running one (I think I’d need to help out on a few first) it’s probably just as well. ^_^
I think the term ‘player abuse’ is something that in the ideal becomes a null concept at the tabletop. In the *ideal*. I realize it’s an unattainable ideal—that there are some dorky things each of us will always do—but it should be possible in the abstract to make a small group of friends happy at the table with a social contract and game expectations that nobody *has* to break to have the kind of fun they’re there for. So that all the dorkiness amounts to is people randomly forgetting themselves. ^_^
Re: stories
I think I see stories easily in life because I have a broken perspective on both of them, rather than because I have a talent. ^_^ It’s more a difficulty in disentangling stories from life, you see. ^_^
Jenna
February 17th, 2005 at 1:21 am
Put another way, I look for system mechanics to help me answer the question, “What are you doing?”
. . . because questions make me afraid. I want to know what I’m allowed to answer, what I’m supposed to answer, etcetera. The problem isn’t so much that I can’t think of interesting things for a character to do, but in the abstract, I don’t know what answers are okay. In a weak-GM game, it’s easy to just throw something out there. In a strong-GM game, it’s an opportunity to screw things up. That’s why I tend to envision good answers as rules-assisted dialogues, where the rules are mostly social contract—if it’s not okay to invent my own plot, then I need to be able to answer, “Helping.” or “Relaxing” or “Paladining,” and get a “Helping whom? (Some thoughts)” or “Relaxing how? (Some thoughts)” or “Paladining? What’s that?”
(To which, of course, I answer, “I’m trying to drink my fellow paladins under the table in a non-alcoholic milk-drinking contest! Poor lactose-intolerant Gustav is, as usual, the first to go—”)
Or whatever.
That’s why getting such answers out of me is like pulling teeth, anyway. It feels like a no-win, and, as you’re well aware, simply knowing that any answer is minimally okay doesn’t keep me from stressing out. It’s probably related to why I like sovereignty over core character concept—because if I don’t have some part of the world where I *do* have authority to define things, and it’s by definition okay, then nothing I do is safe/stressless.
Experience on RPG.net indicates that there is some legitimate gaming theory as well as neurosis in how this works. ^_^
Jenna