Establishing Premise in Serenity RPG
mcv:
Quote from: Callan S. on February 18, 2009, 03:33:43 PM
Also, from what I've seen, didn't Mel give back the advance payment on the train robbery? He didn't break the deal - he declined it and handed back the advance payment. He found a way to fit his own values into the situation (though I imagine it was a painful one - he needs the cash)
But that wasn't part of the deal. The deal was that he did the job, and he didn't. Returning the money make it okay for him, but that didn't make it okay for Niska. And Niska's henchmen made it clear that returning the money wasn't good enough.
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Though it would be an unavoidable choice from a game perspective, because Simon and River are protagonists too, and it wouldn't make much of a game if you kick PCs out as if they were NPCs.
Look no, your screwing up address of premise/nar by forcing a character choice 'in the interest of a better story'
That's my point. From an RPG perspective, threatening to throw them out, and later accepting them into the crew, was only a Nar decision if it was really an acceptable result of play that Simon and River were thrown out of the group. If that's not an acceptable result, then it may have been an interesting story, a dramatic scene, and well roleplayed, but it's not Nar.
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If you were setting it up as a group, you just do a bit of story before - before play you talk about characters you'd all like to see. Then you'd ask each other 'would they all stay on the ship'?
I could imagine a group that might have a few characters 'kicked out' by a Mel character during the brainstorming (and hell, maybe Mel might get kicked out - this is brain storming a campaign, not sticking to formula), before someone suggests River and Simon 'Aww, yeah, he'd take them, but only just!' 'GREAT, were good to go!'
That's exactly what I intend to do. A character creation session where we decide "what happened before", and have everybody create characters that would actually have a chance of becoming part of the crew, and figuring out what situation led to them becoming part of the crew. Basically it's the flashbacks from Out Of Gas, except we need to do them at the start of the campaign. Although I guess we can figure out more details later on.
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As opposed to traditional character gen, where everyone goes off on their own to make characters in secret, then they find at play they just wouldn't be together (and worse, nar play is then fucked up because 'in the interest of a better story' character choices are forced into accepting each other).
Exactly. That process has been bugging me for about 18 years now.
You either get boring characters who only stay together because their adventures are the only interesting things about their otherwise boring lives, or you get interesting characters who would never in a million years have gotten together as a group, or stayed together for more than a day or so. Or you get a mix where the boring characters just follow the interesting ones, and the interesting ones take all the limelight.
Marshall Burns:
Quote from: mcv on February 18, 2009, 01:47:45 AM
Personally, while I appreciate escalating conflict as a basis for a good story in roleplaying (I don't have any experience with it, mind you), I'm not really willing to give up on the Dream altogether. I think, for me and a couple of other players in my group at least, the best games would have a bit of both. Or is that just Narrativism firmly gounded in Exploration? I do like immersion, in any case.
Yes! ALL roleplaying is based on a platform of believability. How sturdy you want that platform is a Techniques issue. I also like it to be nice 'n heavy.
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But none of those quite fits what happens in The Train Job. There, Mal breaks a deal, because he realises the deal would hurt people he doesn't want to hurt. He doesn't lose the Faith, he doesn't feel bad about it, and he doesn't like breaking deals either. He breaks it because it conflicts with something more important.
Well, hang on, there's more rules than I can say all at once :)
A "Lost Faith" that is lost all at once is treated exactly like a Woe, which you can "Heal" when absolved or redeemed. Mal absolves himself by giving back the money, and convinces himself (which is what the Faith system is all about) that doing so justified his actions. He ends up with the same Faith back again, slightly adjusted.
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Another issue I'm still having with using game mechanics to drive story, is that game mechanics can be "gamed": manipulated for profit. I have no idea what Vice and Woe traits do, but they don't sound good. So that'd make Mal's choice one between gaining a bonus for sticking to his Faith, or gaining a new trait that he might not want. To me, that feels like interfering with his freedom to take his own responsibility for his choices. But maybe that's the simulationist in me.
The four categories of Psyche traits (Hunger, Vice, Faith, and Woe) all provide the same benefits (allow you to "Push" through failure, which you can also do if acting for the sake of someone you care about) and all come with their own flavors of trouble.
(Sorry to clutter this all up with Rustbelt rules discussion)
Christopher Kubasik:
Martijn,
Usually when folks play Story Now games, there are a few assumptions built into play:
1) There may or may not be a "group" the PCs belong to. Even if they start as a group, the fact that the Players are have full freedom to make any choices they want for their PCs might mean the group might fracture and the PCs might even be at each other's throats before the characters finish their stories
2) Any conflicts between characters are between CHARACTERS -- not the Players. The Players are working cooperatively to build story... Story might entail conflict between characters. (See betrayals and shifting alliances between Jayne and Mal in Firefly, or the shifting alliances among the crew of Battlestar Galactica, the strike team unit in The Shield, the citizens of Deadwood, and so on as examples.)
3) There is no expectation as to how things should be or will end up. At all. Initial circumstances are created -- and then we start rolling with the story and find out how it's all going to end up. No one, neither the GM nor the Players, can have an agenda or expectations about the way things are going go to be or supposed to be. I can only point, again, to the shows listed above to show how wonderfully varied stories can be once one leaves the "team" mentality behind.
I'm currently GMing a Sorcerer game in the setting of Traveller. My three players created a rich and detailed military background and intertwined history for their PCs. They decided they have a ship, run a merc crew. And then play began... last night one PC was desperately trying to save the religious leader from a mob while another PC trained his weapon on the leaders head, afraid of the trouble the woman would bring to his crew and his friends. It was an incredibly involved struggle for the three PCs as they tried to protect each other -- but also knew that they might come to blows with each other because of their own agendas that might transcend their friendships. (It feels very much like BSG, actually. Two of the PCs have smuggled a nuke onto their ship to use against their enemies (just in case), even though the third PC, the ship's captain, has explicitly forbidden this action.)
The PCs and their merc crew were hired to put down a rebellion on a corporate controlled world, and arrived to find the rebellion backed by a religious jihad with actual, metaphysical angels providing support. Two of the PCs have their own reasons for being moved by the angels, and might end up either siding with the jihad before all is said and done, or trying to tap the power of the Angels for their own needs.
By the time we're done with all this, the PCs might have all killed each other or might be stronger friends than they were before. We just don't know. And that's part of the fun. Everyone is playing from the perspective of their characters and the fiction... it's emotional and visceral and not academic or intellectual at all -- in part because the Player have the freedom to make any choice they want for their PCs out of the fiction as defined up to that point.
So, before I go any further, do you have questions about playing this way? Is this something you can see working? Does it interest you? Why or why not?
Callan S.:
Hi Martijn,
Ah, okay, you were already saying that stuff. Righto, good stuff! Anyway doesn't hurt to repeat them a bit :)
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But that wasn't part of the deal. The deal was that he did the job, and he didn't. Returning the money make it okay for him, but that didn't make it okay for Niska. And Niska's henchmen made it clear that returning the money wasn't good enough.
Yeah, but to say the deal is broken is to look at the two mens positions and as a person yourself, make the descision the deal was broken. To work in that framework is to just examine your own position, or simply work from your position without even examining it, rather than examine the Mel character and his perception that the deal wasn't broke.
Eh, nm. Maybe I sympathise with the character too much.
JB:
Just a quick comment on the observation that players will 'game' mechanics for benefit. This is true, but a game that's well designed to promote Story Now won't make one side of the choice clearly 'better' in terms of profit.
Since you don't have any nar games to refer to yet, consider this extremely rough and overly specific example.
Imagine a game where Mal's player gets Points!* for 'looking out for his' and acting so they don't come to harm. And the player gets to choose NPCs who are 'his' - they go on a list on the character sheet. But if one of the characters on that list does come to harm, or the player wants to take someone off the list, then Mal's player looses Points!
You're going to end up with a character that acts very much like Mal does in the show - you don't want to make everyone 'yours' because you can't look out for them all and will end up in the hole on Points! - but you do need to make some people 'yours' in order to get those gooey, chewy, candy-like Points!
And with a character like that, as the GM, you'd toss a big string of 'NPCs in need' at the player and let him decide whether to mark them, and throw threats at all his marked characters with great regularity. Which is pretty much what the script did to Mal - So, who do you help? Who do you leave to hang? If two of yours are in danger, you try to save em both, but what if you have to choose just one and the benefits are equal for both? - Those choices are where the player has to engage and say something about who's more important - yer sister or yer lover, or whatever.
The player is going to gain Points! in some places, and importantly, loose Points! in others - but he wants to come out on the positive ('in the black'. Ha!) and also most importantly, the choices he makes trying to maximize the gain and minimize the loss will be interesting.
* Points! could be whatever desirable currency you have in your game. In most games, the reward currency can be spent on character improvement of some kind, be that stats, equipment, whatever. That'd work well in this example, as by making the character more effective, the player would be able to take responsibility for ever more NPCs and use them to get more Points! in a big ol' cycle. But whatever they are, players want 'em.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program..
J
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