[SHADOWS]: Is a gradually-built dramatic climax possible?
Ron Edwards:
The trouble is that the quote from the rules does not answer the question I posed. The question is simply left up for grabs in the rules. Maybe I can get my point across through some specific advice.
Here's what I suggest, as an experiment or advice designed specifically to help you with your question: as GM, take total control over all in-game content like "who this person is" or "what does this letter say." Just make it up as you go along, or perhaps some of it as preparation or notes. Use the Shadow rolls only to resolve direct actions on the player-character's part; don't use them to fill in the details of what is there, who a person is, or what's going on already.
I don't claim to be clarifying Zak's intent or to be explaining "how to do the rules right." I do know that this advice is very functional for the purposes you're seeking, while preserving the power and fun of Shadows in the most important moments of play.
If you try this, then the section of rules that you've quoted may be interpreted as saying, "Generate lots of situations that give the player the opportunity to take action, because then you'll have lots of rolls, and lots of rolls means a dynamic, interactive sequence of events."
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Whoops, forgot to add: as far as I can tell, what I'm suggesting is already very much along the lines of your stated personal interpretation anyway. So I think we're agreeing, and I'm trying to help you isolate the way and moments of when rolls are called for.
To continue with the most important bit, which was really dumb not to put into my post, I recommend making it clear to the players when rolls will be applied and when they won't. That means they will understand that there are no wrong actions, and that they should do stuff, do stuff, and do more stuff without worrying whether they're supposed to. And that as long as they treat the rules (what you want, what the Shadow wants) honestly and with a fun spirit, the plot that ensues will itself be honest and fun.
I hope that helps!
Best, Ron
JoyWriter:
I wonder whether there is a way to make the overarching structure that is compatible with the weirder way that this system produces drama:
In a traditional system, it's true that there is a concrete division between character as a vehicle for story creation, and the extra-character events. By re-introducing that this system could be compatible with all the common GMing tricks, but I feel like this is too much of a cop out.
Here's what I find cool about this system; the players are producing their own opposition, automatically making it something they can cope with, and then presumably having that dialled up by the other players to suit themselves, via the token gift mechanism. And when I say suit themselves, I mean suit their narrative interests: Players would only "make things worse" if it suited them, more likely they could make things different, so elements of their own story-telling appear in other players narratives, and beautifully, the token system makes this a gift of story from one player to another!
The next stage I would suggest is a creation of a hierarchy of effect, so that while the players roll to decide things on a certain scale, the GM works out the next scale up. My idea, (although I phrased it in the form of task resolution) was that the players decide details at a scale they choose, and that the GM takes on everything at a scale above it. So for each player the first skill check they use forms a sort of 0 point in the scale, saying that effects from then on will be of about that size, but they will be put together by the GM to form larger effects.
To be honest I fell into normal thought habits when creating the first setup, inspired as it was by normal task resolution mechanics. So I'll try to go at it again, see if I can make a more appropriate version:
The GM can ask players questions, not just about what their character does, but what they experience in certain situations. But they can also set the general course of things and set those as out of reach. Now if you don't limit this to player character action, how do you tie down the players narrative control? Well my idea is that after the first few rolls you put them together to make some extra effect, so you let them play out the first few actions just going on a "you find a book, what's in it?" style of play, essentially allowing their indirect world-building to get them into the swing of things, and then you put together what they have said into a bit you narrate. You either come down on shadow-side or character-side, depending on how the rolls have gone. But having done that, you create some impetus in the setting itself that they can't just roll away, at least with a single roll. The classic example of this is a fight; you say that you can't just kill this guy, you have to play out the fight, and you narrate a small amount of what the enemy does. Then they carry on the rest, saying what alternatives they can come up with etc.
Producing a hierarchy of effect in this way is a big bit of creating drama; certain things cannot be done in a single roll, and so you must chain up actions to get what you want. Now I can't decide if this produces too much planning; planning and long term thinking was my objective with the original recursive model. Hopefully starting small will mark out the importance of the events, producing a rhythm that underlies the fiction even if it doesn't come to the surface.
The thing I called the w plot by the way is shorthand for the standard Hollywood script scaffolding; you have a starting situation with a protagonist, but then events take a turn for the worst, or at least build up their own momentum, until there is a turning point and the protagonist stops being carried along and shapes events, leading to achieving a resolution, where they get what they want, or seem to, before it is proved to be a lull and action shoots off again, more thoroughly this time, with "more at stake" for example, until the protagonist once again gets a hold of events and it eventually reaches it's conclusion, tying up all the stuff that's happened.
Now there's another way to look at it which is just watching the tone, where it goes worse worse worse, better better better, much worse much worse, much better much better, but I wanted to emphasise the "flow of events" thing to relate it closer to what I was thinking about here.
Now this won't have the same "turnaround" structure, but it would have the idea of a flow of events that colours the scene, with changes of tone coming in when the GM interprets the stuff to produce the set of events for them to react to. Now that stuff I was going on about with side-quests is player created events that have no influence on the main flow of stuff, but are still influenced by it.
As an example, say you look at the start of the 1st world war, people can side-quest by creating stuff about a fragile idyll, soon to be changed forever by the coming storm, or about petty cruelties and perseverance soon also to by overshadowed by the coming challenges, and its absurdity. Now if players just keep "sidequesting", then they have accepted those themes as a good bedrock for their play. If they want to go change it, then it will be harder than anything they have yet attempted. Can you imagine an adventure about stopping the "great war"? It would be amazing, whether they side with shadow and end with disheartened characters in the ruins of the second international or arrested and disowned as traitors, or side with character and end up managing to transform the very concept of national pride!
You can give events weight by filling in the steps between them, making them bigger things literally because they are made of so many smaller things. This would mean that character death could be considered to big to waste on a single roll, or made so small that it is replaced with a new replacement.
Death among immortals is a different thing, people loosing heart or giving themselves up, the death of a character if not the death of a being, and in those situations the higher stakes must be something different, if you have let death be a "normal" thing.
Note that this kind of idea allows you to have momentous events as you reach the end of a story, but they are put together by the GM from the players preceding creations rather than produced in a roll.
As one final idea, if my idea about having the player set the scope of a roll doesn't work, perhaps you can take a page from the source material you all enjoy, reading out a sentence that shows how most things happen in that book, its' pacing in other words, and use that as the basis for the scope of players creations.
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