Trollbabe: a seven-yr-old GMs
droog:
Callan: It's a very good question. Why do I want to follow the rules? In fact, it's a question that has been exercising me for quite some time.
It's not simply as a way of discovering my daughter. I have many ways of doing that. It's not just to tell a story together, because we can do that without rules (though she tends to push her ideas over mine).
When I was a kid, my brother and I shared a room. Before we dropped off to sleep we would play what was essentially a sim RPG. We would make up characters drawn from what ever we were currently reading, and we would effectively GM for each other. Nothing ever happened in those games, but we had a lot of fun chewing the scenery and fleshing out our chrs.
When I discovered RPGs, I recognised our old games, but with a more explicit system. It seemed to me then that there was a lot of fun arising from greater structure.
I fully agree with your point about 'the game' taking priority over 'the people'. I don't derive much fun out of playing with strangers, precisely because I don't particularly care about their thoughts and feelings (or because their thoughts and feelings are repellent).
So: I suppose my playing an RPG with my daughter is an attempt to show her an activity with which I have had great experiences. I considered it carefully for years, and looked at all the games I have before settling on TB. I did realise from the start that it was also a way of teaching and learning.
The question remains, and it is essentially the same as the Hard Questions. Why this activity, among many others?
Paul T:
I actually have a suspicion that the whole "narrate a story (or bits of a story) while leaving certain characters within the story free will" is a very unnatural and difficult thing to do. Not difficult like quantum mechanics, but difficult that we have to develop little tricks and procedures to be able to do it. How do you know it's going to fit together if you allow someone else to come along and "spoil it"? What if you were building up to one thing, and that person is thinking of another?
That's why collaborative storytelling is difficult for people to do--or, at least, difficult to do if you're looking for a coherent, quality product or result.
That's why teams of writers have more difficulty creating stories than a single author.
That's why we have the Forge and all these funky games--they are tricks to let us do this thing together. We need to suppress certain natural instincts and urges (even simple ones like. "Ooh! I have a cool idea. How about this happens, and then this, and you do that, and then everything works out?").
When I think back to my early experiences playing RPGs as a kid, I'm pretty sure that all the gaming that went on in an attempt to create "story" was of the heavily railroaded type. There's no natural way to create emergent story together available to us--what we are doing now, with Story Now or Nar games or whatever, is a trick, one step removed from "normal storytelling", that we've developed.
I've played a few times with total non-gamers with no RPG experience, and whenever they are given a chance to GM or frame a scene or anything similar, they always forget to leave the characters involved a chance to act based on free will. Even when reminded, they have difficulty, until they gain some experience observing how another person does it.
That's been my experience, anyway. Can anyone confirm or deny this hunch of mine?
Callan S.:
Hi Paul,
I think perhaps more, were not used to carving a place for our free will in what we instruct others to do. If you tell a person to frame a scene, then they frame a scene - there's nothing in that wording that tells them to leave in some choices for you. They are perfectly within the wording to just frame a scene that happens to or even deliberately chops out any choice. Where the real problem is, perhaps, is wanting free choice, but not telling them how to give you that.
I think perhaps were so used to our free will being respected, we don't think about how our own instructions can actually directly contradict our own free will. So it seems like the other person is in the wrong, even though in the way we instructed them and they followed it very, very accurately. It's like one of those old comedy routines, where the guy says not to let him out (or something like that), no matter how much he begs - then something goes wrong and he has to get out, but the person on the outside wont let him. The person on the outside isn't being bad or ignoring free will.
So instead, what might be unnatural to people is to plan for their own free will. Were all too used to having free will without thinking about how to implement it into our own futures.
JoyWriter:
I wonder if this is a good time to put in my first GMing rule of thumb:
Ask people questions, that are answered by some feature of their character.
Now this isn't perfect, as it still doesn't necessarally give freedom to the player, but it at least makes events dependant on the character they have chosen. (Not much help for you!) The next stage is making questions that are answered by some features of the players personality, but that's like an advanced version that sometimes comes after.
I've played quite a few games with little kids, and there is a certain type who love to boss you about! You can still shift the story around if you start suggesting ideas that fit with what they are doing, and open up new avenues for things they like. (In the purest case, more bossing!)
I'm not sure how much of a bosser Jemima is, but perhaps you could encourage her to see how things could turn out differently by suggesting actions from other stories/films that fit with the situation she is saying about, in other words mesh narratives she is familiar with into a branching structure, so she can see how they inter-relate. So in other words your fitting suggestions in because they are heading towards scenes she likes, while teaching her about alternative consistent histories.
Another way to look at it is trying to know what she likes better than she does, so that she sees that your ideas have the potential to be even better than hers, and so looks forward more to giving people freedom.
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