[A Penny For My Thoughts] Audience Investment and Distributed Fictional Entities
jburneko:
I played A Penny for My Thoughts this Sunday. Present were myself, CK, Eric and Laura. Unfortunately, due to a time restriction we didn’t quite get to finish. We got through three of the four developing narratives.
Eric ended up with a man who was slowly subsuming his brother’s life to the point that in end he had completely forgotten who he originally was.
Laura ended up with a woman who had an escalating competitive relationship with her sister. In the end she challenged her sister to shoot her because she believed herself invincible. When her sister refused she shot herself and then had the police arrest her “weakling sister” for attempted murder.
I ended up with a man who was morally crippled by the love for his wife even though they were divorced. First he covered for her when she tried to kill their kids. Then when his son forced him to confront her about it years later he chose to try and kill himself instead.
CK’s story was the one that didn’t conclude. It was going down the path of a man who had abused his daughter and gone to prison for it and was seeking redemption.
Of those who finished, Laura and Eric decided they didn’t want to remember. I chose to remember.
I think this game definitely experienced the first-play “gonzo” issue described in the book. There were a lot of guns and knives and death and violence. That’s okay but I want to play again. More importantly, I want to play again with people who’ve played before. This is a game that takes practice.
One advice I would give to future players is give people names. There was a lot of “my daughter”, “my brother”, “my girlfriend” and so forth and I think it lent a very detached feeling to things. Early on I made a very deliberate point of calling my girlfriend who later became my wife “Cheryl” and I think that gave her a weight that I think was lacking in some of the other characters.
Laura also pointed out that she found it very disconcerting that none of the PCs had names. To that end I also recommend naming your PC by having someone in your developing narrative call you by name.
Eric was the one who ran into the time limit wall so I didn’t get to debrief with him. However, Laura, CK and I talked for a bit afterwards. I was surprised that they both of them expressed a lack of investment in the developing narratives. Laura compared it to her experiences with being the Authority in Dirty Secrets where because of the lack of ownership, a character that you were developing might suddenly go in a direction you don’t necessarily like. My friend Colin had a similar reaction to being the Authority in Dirty Secrets. And if I’m not mistaken CK kind of said the same thing about the one time we played Spione (although that was kind of a bad Spione session for other reasons).
All this talk has led to me beginning to think I might have a unique creative skill that my friends don’t have. That skill is the ability to invest in a developing fictional entity independent of the real-world voice speaking for that entity. As an example, see this thread here where I totally forgot that the character David was being played by two different people: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=27595.0
Consider, for example, that we’re playing a Sorcerer game. Theoretical player Joe is playing theoretical PC Balthazar. The GM throws down a Bang because we as the group want to see how Balthazar will react to that Bang. But! Part of that anticipation includes Joe. How is *JOE* going to MAKE Balthazar react to that Bang.
That can’t happen in a game like Penny and it can’t happen with the supporting characters in Spione or Dirty Secrets because the primary decisions for those characters are distributed across the group. You have to be able to invest in the character and his fictional situation and choices independently of the social entity who speaks for that character at any given time. This takes a tremendous amount of creative trust. Trust that your fellow players see the same things you’re seeing and trust that when they don’t they’ll take it somewhere equally as compelling.
Consider again the highest abstracted layer of how a game like Sorcerer works. The GM presents a thematically charged bang. The player has his character takes thematically revealing action on that situation. The system is deployed and thematically relevant consequences fall out from that action which leads to the GM presenting a new thematically charged bang. (This is basically what’s outlined in Sorcerer & Sword).
This is the key: I don’t see that process as being all that fundamentally different from the one presented in Penny. All that’s different is who’s speaking for what fictional entity.
In Penny the player presents, in the form of a first person narrative, a thematically charged bang for the “I” entity to react to. A randomly selected player then has the character take a thematically revealing action on that situation. The player then describes the thematically relevant consequences that fall out from that action which leads to them presenting another first person bang.
As an audience, I’m invested in the narrative in the identical way between the two methods. I’m curious to see what the character is going to do next and what consequences his actions will bring him. This is the unique skill I think I must possess. I’m able to abstract my participation as an audience member of the developing fiction away from my participation in the activity that is being used to create that fiction.
Now the details of the activity of Sorcerer and the activity of Penny are completely different. That matters. My investment as a participant has to be in totally different places between the two games. To me that is a matter of learning how to use the tools appropriately to create the compelling fiction that I’m processing as an audience member. It’s taken me years and years to learn how to use the tools in Sorcerer to bring effective focus to the developing narrative.
As I see it, here are the key skills to develop *if* you’re interested in producing thematic narratives with A Penny For My Thoughts.
As the Traveler the single most important skill to develop is to consider yourself “GMing” for the “I” entity in the fiction. Paul said to me, “Penny is the game where you GM your character and everyone else plays your character.” He’s absolutely right. Focus on what choices you want to see the “I” entity confronted with and use your massive scene framing and NPC authority to put them there.
The strongest example of me doing this in our game was just after my character’s ex-wife Cheryl had tried to kill our kids. I found myself wondering if “I” would turn her to the police. So, I cut directly to the hospital after the shooting and narrated a police officer walking up to me and asking me exactly what happened, “What did I say or do then?”
That decision process was absolutely no different from the one I would have made if that scene were happening in a game I was GMing and a player had just had his NPC ex-wife shoot his kids. I would have cut to the hospital and said, “A police officer walks up to you and wants to know what happened?”
Working within the constraint of first-person thought, feeling and perception is tough to get used to but what you really want to do is ask yourself what choices you’re interested in seeing “your character” confronted with and cut as cleanly to those moments as possible.
As the Guide I found myself fighting against my GMing instincts when I realized I had absolutely no control over what situations the current Traveler was going to face. There were times I wanted to see more of Laura’s character interacting with her sister and no way to make that happen. Laura had a similar problem because she kept trying to include other character’s actions in her response to “What did I say or do then?” Like at one point Eric’s character’s brother pulled a gun on him. Laura’s response to the Asking for Guidance was, “When your brother tried to shoot himself, you wrested the gun from him.” I had to remind her that she couldn’t do that.
However, it’s a bit of a lie to say you have NO input. Because the Guiding Questions you get to ask about the Memory Triggers are you one and only opportunity to push the situation you want to see on the Traveler. If you want to see the Traveler deal with something put it in your Guiding Questions.
For example, Eric’s first memory was about how he covered for his brother’s mistake when they were kids. I wanted to keep that dynamic alive. So when Eric pulled, “The sound of leafing pages” as his second memory Trigger I asked, “Was it your brother’s diary?” Similarly, there was a Memory Trigger for Laura that was developing into her character skydiving. Her previous memory had been about the tension between her and her sister, so I asked, “Were you doing it because your sister dared you to?”
Reincorporation for this game is fucking key. In fact, if I have one criticism of the text it’s that while it does an excellent job developing the conceptual tools you need within a single memory, it does very little in developing the tools you need to properly chain the memories together into a single story. But that’s a quibble.
Jesse
Noclue:
Yes, I agree the ability to invest in the character as an entity apart from the player is one of your super powers.
The difference between Sorcerer and Penny that you describe as being "not fundamentally all the different" is fundamentally completely different. Sharing the control over a PC the way Penny does is completely different from how Sorcerer behaves.
jburneko:
James,
I think you mistook my point. I was talking in the most abstracts of abstracts. I'm saying that Sorcerer (and certain other games) and Penny share an underlying cycle of narrative development and that what excited me about Penny was seeing that cycle distributed in a different way.
Obviously, the resultant play experiences are NOTHING alike. Yes, totally and vastly different. As I said the way one invests as a participant is totally different. And that difference may be a deal breaker on ones ability to enjoy the two different experiences.
Jesse
Noclue:
Jesse,
Well, I think I understand the point and I think it is valid in so far as relates to bangs. So, in Sorcerer the GM throws Bangs at the Player responds with a thematically relevant action. In Penny, the player throws a bang at their PC and other players provide a choice of actions for the original player to work into a thematically relevant narrative.
What I see as a fundamental difference is that the Sorcerer player sets up the PC with flags and a kicker, which signal premise to the GM. In Penny, the character is a blank slate, there's no Premise for the character and the narrative at the start of play. Premise is crafted through incorporating the suggestions at the table and weaving them into a theme during play. There's really no way to judge if a suggestion is thematically relevant or not. Things are just harder or easier to fit into a narrative that the player is building in real time. That's an interesting exercise, but one that is profoundly different from Sorcerer and that difference is distinct from how narrative control is distributed.
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
As a possible trivial interjection, Geez! Jesse, have you seen the movie Swimming With Sharks?
Bset, Ron
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