What's narrativist about Zero RPG?
mcv:
Quote from: lumpley on February 12, 2009, 04:26:46 AM
IF, in actual play, the story emerges automatically from the well-designed personality of the character, because the game, setting, and other characters (and their players) work to make it so, that's Story Now. If it doesn't, it isn't.
Your attitude toward your own character isn't the point. Whether you create story, actively, as a group, in play, is the only point.
So in order to get Story Now, all we really need is a setting that facilitates Story, and that everybody designs their character so that it ties into that. Correct?
Because that's what I have been trying to accomplish, particularly in a recently failed GURPS Traveller campaign. The problem is that nobody actually designed their character in such a way (especially not the new guy who wants more Narrativism), except for one player (our usual GM), and one character that I deisgned for another player (a disruptive deep character roleplayer who played the Mad Max in our little blood opera I mentioned earlier).
But I have trouble getting a story going even with those two characters and those two players. But I think that's because of two big problems:
I did everything wrong, forgot my original intentions, and went into full GURPS Traveller Gearhead mode. I was reading all my GURPS Traveller books searching for irrelvant details to make it a more realistic Sim, and for little missions and plot hooks that would get the crew going, but didn't affect them personally in any way.2. We hadn't agreed on a Premise in advance, so there wasn't a common theme. Especially not with the two characters that completely lacked story, obviously. The other two actually fit the "Outcasts & Misfits" and "Keep Flying" themes I identified in the Serenity Premise thread, and they even both had a "Hidden Secret", one of them identified (a mad scientist doctor who had participated in a horrible massacre on a nearby planet), and one them not (a Scout with uncontrolled psychic powers who had some unidentified tragic event while in the Scout Service).
Now that I read it, I think there should have been plenty to work with. At least with those two characters. But I didn't use it. Instead, I suckered them into a simple heist, executed it badly (one guy went in on his own, I wanted to get the rest involved, so I had the one guy shot), and then followed up with a few sessions of boring travelling and trading. The only one who addressed premise was the mad doctor. The simple heist did come with a minor moral issue (I hesitate to call it a dilemma): the gem they stole from a rich collector wasn't a gem, but an egg from a newly discovered sentient race, and trade in it is highly illegal. The player played the mad doctor just a bit madder than I'd envisioned, and murdered everybody who knew about the heist. Also, whenever the crew was about to pick up a cargo headed for the planet where he was involved in that massacre, he sabotaged it, sometimes by murdering the passenger.
One other error was that I allowed the doctor's player to do all his secret murders hidden from the other players (not just their characters), so the others never got the chance to appreciate his actions or his reasons for them. It was also probably a bad move to give a Dr. Mengele to a character roleplayer who loves any excuse to disrupt, dominate or twist. And yet, from what I read here, I get the impression he was more on track towards Story Now than anyone else (including the new guy who explicitly wanted narrativism).
My guess is that in order to fix this, we should agree on Premise before we design the characters, and remind ourselves every session that we need to address that premise. Is that correct?
lumpley:
Quote from: mcv on February 12, 2009, 05:16:24 AM
So in order to get Story Now, all we really need is a setting that facilitates Story, and that everybody designs their character so that it ties into that. Correct?
Correct! That's one way to do it. Here's a thread of mine from ... holy crap a long time ago, on precisely that point: Egri & the "Lumpley Principle".
Your GURPS Traveller experience makes a lot of sense to me.
Quote
My guess is that in order to fix this, we should agree on Premise before we design the characters, and remind ourselves every session that we need to address that premise. Is that correct?
Well, that can work, I expect.
If the game's rules bring focus to the premise by default, instead, unlike GURPS', you don't need to always remind yourselves. That's a driving principle behind Story Now design: to create game rules that help everyone make appropriate characters, and help the GM (or the group) to challenge them appropriately, all without too much explicit, social-level discussion about what we're going to do. (Ask my friends: explicit, social-level discussion about what we're going to do makes me all twitchy.)
Anyway, yes! Yes and yes.
-Vincent
greyorm:
Looks like its coming together for you, mcv! That's great!
I'll drop back in quick with the term issue, then. I do understand the term usage confuses you, but in this case, you admitted yourself that you have no understanding of these term's usage in literature. To use a computer analogy for a moment, imagine you've called tech support because your computer doesn't work, and when the technician asks you if your mouse is working, you answer "huh?" (because you're thinking small, furry rodent), and when he tells you to open up a window, you ask "in the living room or upstairs?" (because you're thinking rectangular glass plane mounted on your house), etc.
Now, you can either tell the technician his terms are nonsensical and then go find a dictionary and look up "mouse" and "window" to show him how he's "wrong" because you feel you need to prove it to them and tell them how using those terms are confusing etc., or you can accept that the problem with the jargon in this case is not a case of "those crazy computer people using descriptions for words that don't mean what they say and just confuse everyone (ie: me)!"
I can assure you that these definitions are not a "weird Forge thing" at all, and are established literary terms with real and specific meanings, even if they are unfamiliar to you. And I think the best way to approach the issue you are having with them is to ask if you would keep in mind we aren't talking about philosophy or ethics, that the terms seem weird right now and that's OK, and for you to be willing to try to avoid confusing moral dilemmas and ethical dilemmas.
Though this is only going to work if you're going to trust me on the above. Deal?
Quote
Premise: In his seminal work, The Art of Dramatic Writing, Lajos Egri introduced the world of theatre to the idea of premise. Premise is very similar to theme but to Egri it is much more powerful, decisive and less open to misinterpretation. The goal of any good play must be to prove its premise and all aspects of the play must be focused on leading the audience to that conclusion. Offered as examples are premises such as: "great love defies even death", "Blind trust leads to destruction, "Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love".
You can Google for more info on Egri's premise if needed, but with the above in mind, it should hopefully be clear the premise is the "moral" of the story in a particular work, like the moral of a fable ("slow and steady wins the race", etc).
The premise is a human issue and commentary on that issue, but it is not usually a single troubling ethical decision point. Which I mention because I sense you are thinking of such you hear "moral dilemma" and when you talk about them occurring in all sorts of games. For example: "Do I save the village or the girl?" <---- but this is not a premise.
Make sense?
As an author of fiction, one tries to show (or "prove") the premise you've already chosen ("love is blind", "fear destroys humanity", etc) by highlighting its effect on the protagonists. If you are a GOOD author, you don't throw the premise in the reader's face, they don't even really know it is there, and you make that outcome--that answer--that premise--that "the moral of the story"--seem uncertain, even while you keep hammering on it (foreshadowing) right up to the end.
That is, you write such that it seems the moral you're proving isn't decided ahead of time, so the premise isn't completely obvious until the end of the story when the premise you chose before writing is finally proven once-and-for-all (or perhaps revealed to the reader), and you find out what "the moral of the story is". (Example: "Oh, the hare won, because...{moral, ie: premise}")
So when an author writes a story, even though he's chosen the outcome, he presents a conflict between story-morals to the reader, where any particular "moral" seems like it could win out. This crates conflict and tension. So you have the protagonist wanting something and something else getting in his way, telling him "Nope, it's going to be THIS WAY instead".
For example, if we're writing about the jealousy premise above, then the main character wants to be jealous and not be destroyed by it (etc) even though all signs in the narrative are pointing to that being the outcome. You read and think, "He's going to destroy himself and his love if he keeps up with his jealous behavior!" which is put-in-your-head by the conflicts the reader sees reasserting and supporting that idea, with the protagonist braving jealousy and destruction to their (and his) ultimate end when the moral/premise is absolutely revealed ("Oh no! See! He destroyed himself and his love through jealousy!").
A well-crafted story presents an uncertainty about the success-correctness of any particular action and what that outcome means in that situation: it presents "conflicting morals", making the actual moral to the story both apparent and yet uncertain, such as in the story of the Tortise and the Hare (see below). So we, the reader, don't really know what the moral is going to be until the last page, until the revealing situation resolves (either the fast, cocky hare or the slow, steady turtle crosses the finish line first).
That's how premise works in fiction. Or at least it is a really quick and dirty version of it, but hopefully enough for you to understand the authorial perspective on the terms and get what this "premise" thing is.
Premise isn't much different in an RPG, with one alteration.
In a Narrativist game, the premise can't be already answered. Instead you have to ask "the question" of the premise, and gameplay proves or disproves the premise/answers the question: "Does great love defy even death?", "Does blind trust lead to destruction?", "Does jealousy destroy itself and the object of its love?", "Does slow and steady win the race?"
In the case of Zero, if that game were a work of literature instead, the writer would be writing "The price of individuality is..." and have slotted something in there which would be revealed and supported through the course of the fiction. So in literature, you would start with something like: "The price of individuality is NOT worth barely surviving." And then prove that true with what you show happening to your protagonists.
But with a Narrativist game, you're asking during the game, rather than before you start: "What is the price of individuality?" (or narrowing it down even further "Is the price of individuality worth barely surviving?" or etc). The answer--the triumphant moral arising from the conflicting possible morals--isn't known going in and won't be answered until the end of the game. It's what the protagonist is trying to figure out for the player through play: what's the moral here in this situation and what does it tell us about the human condition (or rather, this particular human's condition here-and-now)?
So, in a Narrativist RPG, the answer--the moral--becomes interactive, rather than set, with the players making the choices that will reveal the resolution to the dilemma/the premise/the moral of the story based on their choices and the results of those choices--and the GM takes the role of presenting situations that allow that premise to be explored and answered one way or another until the encompassing situation resolves.
Does the hare win, or the tortoise? Is the premise, the moral of the story, going to be "slow and steady wins the race" or "speed and certainty decide victory"? (see "conflicting morals" above)
Is it coming together for you, I hope?
Again: Through play, one answers the premise: (at its most simple) "does it?" "doesn't it?" The answer--the triumphant moral arising from the conflict issues--isn't known going in and isn't answered before play. The premise (the question, the dilemma) itself is known, and the GM keeps providing scenes and situations where that question can be explored and answered.
But another important ingredient here is the human connection of the premise. It's relation to the human condition, to human emotion or human drives like love, fear, desire, hate, jealousy, courage, etc.
That's what is being talked about when we say "premise" in regards to Narrativism. It's also why "moral dilemma" is interchangable with the term (though unless a light bulb went on as to why that is, really do just forget about the "moral dilemma" phrasing and use "premise" for the moment because the former is causing you more confusion and frustration than anything).
Also, mcv, thanks for the "right/wrong" correction. I was clearly typing faster than I was thinking at that moment. I should have said "an unclear choice of what's good and what's bad, or what the better solution is between equally unpalatable ones". "A hard choice" was probably sufficient!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page