[A Penny For My Thoughts] Audience Investment and Distributed Fictional Entities
ptevis:
I'm reading in fascination, but I haven't had time to compose a reply. Coming soon, I promise!
jburneko:
James we're either in fierce agreement or talking past each other. Because, I agree with what you're saying.
Ron, I haven't seen that film, so I looked it up in the IMDB... and now I think I might be giving the wrong impression. Maybe I'm trying to communicate something too subtle?
Paul, I await your thoughts eagerly.
Jesse
ptevis:
Jesse,
I think your analysis is pretty spot on. A few comments.
GMing your character: You've got the right of it, especially with regards to agressively framing "your character" into relevant situations. Also, I've started to use this explanation more, as it seems to click with people.
Input from the Guides: You can be a little tricky about it. If I we're in Laura's place in your example, I'd probably say, "You wrestled the gun away from him, terrified he was going to shoot himself with it." I don't have to narrate his actions, I just have to plant the seed in the Traveler's mind about what might happen.
Multi-memory stories: You're probably right, the advice text could be stronger, particularly in chapter five. Did the stuff on reincorporation in chapter three not work for you?
--Paul
jburneko:
Paul,
I think what I find "lacking" in Penny's text would have required to you break the in-character conceit of the text. The reincorporation material in Chapter 3 is good in making sure that the developing narrative doesn't go off in a 1000 unconnected directions. However, I'm looking at something even higher than that.
What your game does (at least on my reading) is produce a three act play. As such the narrative "goal" of the first memory is not the same as the narrative "goal" of the second memory. I was surprised that the questionnaire was simply "Pleasant Memory" and "Unpleasant Memory" as I was expecting something much more strongly worded suggesting of Act I and Act II of the same narrative.
Now there's a lot of implication there. Pleasant->Unpleasant->Trauma implies a decent especially when combined with the reincorporation material. I think the natural storyteller in us recognizes that pattern, seizes hold of that pastern and uses it. However, given the limited scene economy it is not sufficient to construct ANY unpleasant memory from the details of the first memory. To have any kind of thematic thruline you have to construct a second memory that specifically represents a turning point on whatever emotional commitment was made in the first memory. Basically you need to know what Act II in a three act play does.
In my case the strongest thing from the first memory was that my character had found strength in the love his girlfriend. I knew in the second memory I had to put that strength the test. The thing is I almost missed it. I got very wrapped up in the "shock" of my ex-wife trying to kill our kids that I almost forgot to ask the question. Fortunately, I caught myself and used my last penny to jump to the scene in the hospital with the police officer. After that scene I had my answer; the strength I valued from the first act had turned into a moral weakness. And I harnessed that full force in third act.
Now, I'm assuming A LOT here. I'm really honing in on, "how to construct a three act play" with A Penny For My Thoughts and maybe that wasn't a concern of yours. But both CK and Laura expressed a lack of investment in the developing narratives and I think really focusing on what you need to do in Act I, how to develop that in Act II and what that amounts to in Act III is the key to fixing that problem.
Jesse
Christopher Kubasik:
I've been uncertain how to enter this thread -- I've been waiting for some sort of big uber-crystalization of all the things in my head.... and so far it hasn't happened yet.
So I'm going to just jump in with little bits.
First, Paul, congratulations on the game. While the conceit of the instructions might not work for other games, you certainly built an engaging read that taught us all how to play the game. Moreover, as I said to everyone at the table, "This game does exactly what it set out to do." I think the gang thought I was damning with faint praise. But I wasn't! I'm a fetishist about design elements -- design in fine art, design in screenplays, design in RPGs. I truly believe you knew what you wanted, and built it.
Second, I'm still not sure where my derailment of investment came from. It might have been the game, or it might have been the way we played. As Jesse suggests, practice would make the experience very different. Next time around I might go in thinking, "Okay, I want more this THIS, so if I do X, I'll probably get more of THAT." And so on.
Third, off the top of my head, here's a thing... which might be a matter of the game or a matter of lack of practice:
After thinking about it a bit, I suspect my lack of involvement came in part from a lack of forward motion on the part of the protagonists.
Let's examine: The protagonists have no backstory, no context, no relationships already baked in. ALL of that will be added through the creation of the story. It's not like many stories with these stuff is added through the TELLING of story -- "Oh, he has a girlfriend," we find out three minutes after the movie started. No. In this game this character has NO CONTEXT at all until it is added.
The protagonist has no agenda. I mean, nothing. Even in a movie where the problems don't become clear till later there is something going on. I usually use the movie ALIEN to illustrate this. Everyone says, "Nothing happens till the middle." But this is not true. The crew of the ship is on their way home -- and want to get home -- and this is true even before the credits have and made clear to the audience in the first seconds of the movie. But in PENNY there is not context at all. So the there is nothing to push against or toward as a pseudo-GM or pseudo-player of the PC. (Or however we want to phrase this.) I was somewhat at sea about what the heck to focus on.
One story -- the story of Eric's character -- really seemed to have a structure to it. And I think it's key that once everyone picked up on this notion of the sibling rivalry we were ON IT as a group.
My character, on the other hand, seemed to just skid on ice for a while. I didn't know how the first memory tied to the second. And even now, I'm not sure what I would have done to kick off the second memory to make sure it grew more narratively out of the first memory. (Which I think is the key.)
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