[Primetime Adventures] unexpected upsides of new play style
David Berg:
Let me begin this by saying that I've never played Narrativist before. I'm assuming that the instance of play I'm about to describe was Nar, but I could be completely wrong. Regardless, it was very different from any other play experience I've had.
Saturday night at Dreamation 2008. GM is Remi, players are myself and 6 other folks. Here are my personal highlights:
What's this gonna be about?
Other player suggestions included:
"Spin - how the perception of reality is deliberately distorted."
"Neutral ground with its own rules."
"Football, or some other form of competition."
"Pre-Boxer Rebellion China."
I added:
"A secret organization that may or may not be benevolent."
Remi eventually came up with, and the group agreed on:
"A port city in a China that never quite was. The colonial British police are at war with the Chinese gangs (tongs). The two sides can only meet peacefully in a certain tea house. The British police includes a secret department."
Character creation
As soon as the genre/setting were chosen, I came up with a character:
"A Chinese man who has bought into British cultural imperialism, thinks of Chinese as backwards, and works for the head of the secret police."
Some of the others players chose:
Fred: "An old British cop gone native, who often lets off Chinese criminals."
Jonathan: "A racist British officer."
Julie: "A female tong leader bent on driving out the Brits."
Fred and I instantly agreed that our characters should work together, with mine being more of a loyal Brit than his despite our races. Awesome!
Someone suggested that I be the brother of the tong leader. Awesome!
Someone suggested that the racist officer be my boss. Awesome!
Collaborative scene-framing
At some point a Chinese thief needed to be caught. Jonathan saw an opportunity to hit on both my issues and Fred's issues -- as my boss, he ordered me to go catch the thief, and then said that I obviously couldn't do it alone, so the Fred's cop had better go with me. Naturally, my character was incensed, and told Fred's cop that his local-loving ass wasn't needed. But I didn't actually want him out of the scene. So Fred and I agreed that Fred's cop would pretend to leave, and then secretly get to the thief and keep the thief one step ahead of me by clumsily following him. Awesome! A few rolls later, the thief was home free, but I'd spotted Fred's cop and suspected he was up to something.
Later in the game, Jonathan suggested he'd frame me for an illegal move he wanted to make. I said, "Can I find out?" He said, "Hell yes!" We both wanted to drive up the tension between my love for the Brits and my mistreatment by this particular one. Awesome!
At the very end of the game, after I'd forsaken the local Brits and returned to my family, Julie said that her character stepped down to allow me to claim my inheritance as leader of the tong. Remi asked me for a final scene. I described the tong council meeting room, with my character marching in, wearing Chinese traditional clothing but striding in British military step, and saying, "There are going to be some changes in the way things are done around here." Awesome! Rather than trusting the Brits to bring British virtues to my people, I was gonna do it myself, in my own way.
Julie then came up with an even better final scene for my character. After the council scene, I was seen at home, reverently folding up a British flag and putting it away, and then finally going to show my respects at the shrine of my father, who I had hated in life. Awesome!
Takeaway
After reading a lot about Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Shadow of Yesterday, I had formed this impression of Nar play as very serious and intense and weighty. It seemed like a focused drive to make personal statements so deep and challenging that they'd affect the players emotionally in a profound way. So when I went into the PTA game, I was very curious to see whether I liked that.
What I wasn't expecting was the constant authorial creativity. I get to make shit up beyond what my character does? I get to make shit up about what's going on in the characters' enviornment, and what other people's characters might do? And they get to make suggestion for my character? And we hash it all out based on what we agree is coolest? Hell, I know I like that!
The emotional impact for me was minimal in terms of "loyalty to those close to you is more important than obedience to an organization you respect", but was huge in terms of "that was a cool story!" What a pleasant surprise!
Joshua A.C. Newman:
Hey, Dave!
I'm happy to see you having a good time! I'd like to hear how this is influencing the design of the game you were talking about if at all. Can you post some AP about it to contrast (if you haven't already)?
David Berg:
Hi Joshua,
The PtA experience isn't influencing my current game design at all, but it's making me more eager to finish my current game and move on to other things!
Alas, I don't have any AP that reflects the current state of my game. (Though this thread, particularly this post, shows an earlier version with similar styles of immersion and small-scale setting-interaction.) Hopefully I'll have a playtest of the current version to post about in the next two months.
Robert Bohl:
David, it was great to meet you and I didn't realize you were a virgin to this kind of play before. Cool. I can also precisely sympathize with your reaction to PTA, because it was the exact one I had.
Remi Treuer:
Hey David,
It was really great playing with you.
The last time I ran the Miniseries at Camp Nerdly it was among the most emotionally-impacting games I've ever played, and I was wondering what was different. There were a few more people, but everyone at the table at Dreamation had shown up to play, so that wasn't it. There was a bit more disparity in play style and experience with the system, but not much. I realized on the way home what it was. I believe that I insisted at the Nerdly PTA game that everyone have their issue pointing at a specific person. This avoids the abstract idea trap that some of the Issues fell into, which is fine in an extended game, but makes life hard when you're going for short and sweet.
Having all the characters pointed in a real way at a person I could threaten gave me a big grip to push the game along without being quite as, ah, authoritative as I was at the game on Saturday. This theory is borne out, as you and Julie were among the easiest people to frame or suggest scenes for, exactly because of that, and it made the last third of the game the easiest (beyond the loss of players) story-wise to run. Unfortunately, I was pretty dopey by then, and so the game remained pretty loose.
Also, the intensely shared narration in the game was something I hadn't encountered much before. Usually people take responsibility for their own scenes, or look to the Producer, maybe with occasional input from other players. I think the amount of back-and-forth we saw happens when there's a bunch of people who are suddenly handed lots of narrative authority for the first time. I'm glad it turned out OK, with a good amount of back-and-forth between everyone, and strong suggestions all around. I'm glad there wasn't a, "Hey, don't do that" moment among the players.
Thanks for bringing it to the table. I would totally like to play with you again. Next year in New Jersey!
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