Establishing Premise in Serenity RPG
FredGarber:
There's a couple of things I want to chime in on. In summary, many role players are trained to expect certain things, or think about things certain ways. It took me a long time to see that C.Agenda wasn't just an axis between Role and Roll, but actually had three points of Step Up, Dream, and StoryNow! (*)
1. I had an idea, when I started, that Story Now! was somehow light on GM Work, since I didn't need to worry about charts of weapon comparisons (that helped players Share the Dream), or complex Skill trees (to determine if my players Stepped Up to the Challenge).
This was SOOO Wrong.
There are plenty of work for a GM in StoryNow, and a lot of it is what I think would fall under "Discussion of mechanics, with Low Immersion" for the players.
The longer the campaign is set to go, the more a GM needs work to make sure all his players are feeling like Protagonists, and aren't being overwhelmed by the free choice to direct the story. It's more cerebral, "fiddly" work, and less about making sure that all the NPCs have unique funny voices.
2. Because a StoryNow campaign is often more open-ended by design, sometimes players feel 'lost,' and lose interest. It's important to add shorter campaign "tales," or episodic elements, so that players can see milestones. In Shared Dream play, keeping things going without end is a goal in itself. In Gamist play, there's usually levels and XP and things like that to worry about. In Narr play, oftentimes the campaign end after 6-10 sessions. It's not because the story is played out, but because the players are preconditioned to expect XP and to increases in effectiveness, and some StoryNow games don't have that.
3. In StoryNow Games, ESPECIALLY a game based on Firefly where there is a specific feel and style that you're trying to reproduce, players should talk out loud, to each other, while building the characters. It's important that characters are built with motivations and goals that aren't designed to crash into each other. OR, if they are built that way, that the players know that they have motivations that might conflict, and they're ready and expecting that. In some systems, players can design their characters without talking, and still get functional play. Most Nar games aren't like that (although there are exceptions)
4. Why some people say StoryNow! games are like StepUp games: In Gamist and Narr games, players need to spend a certain amount of thought on what game mechanics they're going to use. If the whole session passes and there's no dice rolling (or other Conflict Resolution), then the scenes are usually flat and unsuccessful. Either characters are not pushing the Premise, or not Stepping up to Challenges. In Simulationist games, the rules are there to facilitate the Dream, and if players spend three sessions without ever creating a Conflict, all Exploring Character and Setting, they might call that a successful play.
5. In most StoryNow play, the only limit as to how deep the player can address the Premise is based on how much they want to, from day one. Increases in Effectiveness usually only increases how much the story goes your way As Opposed to the Other Players. This sometimes leads to a player vs player mentality, or player vs GM, where players feel like they've lost when the story doesn't go their way, instead of feeling like they've won by creating an interesting scene. Creating a flat scene is how you lose at Narr, not by not getting your own way.
-Fred
(*) The NOW part of StoryNow is important, because a good story can emerge from Gamist or Sim play, but it isn't the focus (NOW!) of the players.
Dr_Pete:
Hi Christopher,
I've given your points some thought...
On the first point, I think there's a major distinction that needs to be made that I do think I had in mind, but may not have communicated clearly. That is, the distinction between the characters working together, and the game "working" as an actual group activity.
I, at the moment, think that the characters need to be sufficiently bound together on some level that when Alan is "active", Betty has a reason to be tuned in, and not be just waiting for her turn. The classic example of this is when somebody goes off alone, and the GM and player go into another room. I don't think that hypothetical boredom of Betty's is because she's self-absorbed. When groups split up, it often derails the momentum, because there's at least a sense that you're a spectator for extended periods.
A stereotypical character good for a lot of games is something like Boba Fett. Mysterious, standoffish, tactically strong. Watching someone play that character skulking around a bar and not talking to anyone is boring. Heck, being in a long car ride with him would be boring. A lot of characters are built for solo or tactical play, and watching somebody else play through combat is not usually a good gaming experience. For these and various other reasons, you don't usually split up the group.
The questions is, how do you liven up the game from this model so that it remains a viable game for everyone even if the characters are in different places, and even if the characters are in conflict. Obviously, it's possible, as various threads here have shown. I think part of the success must come from the emphasis on constructing something more story-like, with dramatic tension.
But you have written, and Ron wrote in the Art Deco thread, about it being important that the characters be linked, at some level. My sense is that that is important to increase the player's interest in what's happening at the table when they're not "on". I don't think it's just an issue in Martijn's games. Doing interesting things, things worthy of an audience, is the another part of that equation. It may be that the frequency of cutting between different groups is higher, as well. Are we talking, typically, about 2-3 minutes before moving on, 10-15 minutes, or something else?
As for character conflict, I would absolutely buy that characters can be at each others throats, even if family, etc. If I played in a game like that, though, dealing with that conflict would probably take priority over a good chunk of the "adventure" though (obviously I'm approaching this discussion from the perspective of a game like D&D, with a GM generated plot, etc). Those conflicts are traditionally very annoying because of metagame concerns that tend to take away options like having a real fight. I think I mentioned a game I played many years ago where we had a thief stealing from other characters during a dungeon crawl... that's a violation of a usually unspoken social contract among players, even if the character class was thief. A realistic reaction might be to kill him and leave him to rot in the dungeon, but that also seemed, at the time, like it would be wrong to do. That said, I could totally see how a game with this other focus could be very cool and engaging. I think it's very clearly NOT something to try to sneak into a traditional game with traditional expectations to try to bring the game to another level.
On point 2:
I see that if the players agree that they "want" to be tied together with some structure that they would be less inclined to create characters that would send them flying off in different directions, or ripping each others throats out. I guess I was primarily thinking about the structure the people around the table come to in creating the characters.
There's a big difference between "create your own character, doing your own thing which interests you" which seems to characterize the Art Deco and the Gothic Fantasy game setups, and what happened in the HeroQuest game. That was what I was driving at... what structure, if any, can/should the GM provide players as they set about doing character creation? Traveler Sorcerer seems to say "you're all old war buddies" while in the HeroQuest game the players seem to have spontaneously decided to play a family. Without some guidance before starting creation, do they typically form strong links, or start independent? In my past play, I've done the "everyone create a character, and I'll figure out how to bring your characters together" setup. It can work, but I see that it is only superficially similar.
And on 2b)
It's definitely true that those kickers are all there, and without the "tv show" constraint, Mal could have killed Jayne. In fact, his name's escaping me, but the pilot of Buffy (another Whedon creation) featured the death of one of the original group of buddies which might otherwise have become the Scooby Gang, if I remember correctly.
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