What is Right to Dream for?
contracycle:
I certainly agree we have that option, but I don't agree with what I see as a the prime assertion in this thread, that translating in-game events into narrative story is an inevitable and fundamental function of play. I'm not ruling out the possibility that a series of in-fiction events, when recounted or remembered, will tend to be structured in a story-like way, just as an experience of the real world would be structured if recounted. But we do not actually experience reality in that form; storytelling is an art because it is NOT just a bare recounting of What Happened, but is so constructed as to be entertaining.
Entertaining in this sense must, so LitCrit has it, contain some element of personal and moral relevance. Fine, I can buy that, not least because the audience is passive. Seeing as the audience is NOT involved in creating anything, NOT involved in doing or saying or even, really, thinking, the payoff they get for sitting there for 2 hours or whatever, and which an artist must deliver, is that the production they then passively consume contains personal relevance.
But when playing in RPG, just as when, say, performing tricks on a snowboard or building a model yacht, the person executing the task can be fully engaged with the task. The task does not need to be imbued with narrative, with moral philosphy, with assertions about constants of human nature. None of that is needed as the payoff, because the task is itself the payoff. It's not excluded as the payoff either, I hasten to add, but it's not necessary.
I had a good experience in which I could say I learned something in a game of V:tM. What I learned had nothing to do with the human condition or anything along those lines, but I found it interesting. V:TM doesn't get enough love, IMO, not least becuase it bills itself as a game about those issues of human condition, but I approached it in a very different way: via the trope of a "secret world", a conspiracy-type concept. It fails as a game that wants to address proper Narr, but as a Sim game, which is what it really is, in the hands of Sim players, it worked more than well enough (concerns about system aside). In one of the few games in which I can answer your question from the players perespective, I played as the Prince of a city, not something I planned but which the GM dumped on me. Fair enough, I was up for it. In the canon, a Prince makes certain demands of people entering their territory, namely to report in and request permission to feed, which is amostly a pro forma thing. It happens becuase the Prince needs to keep track of how many vampires are in the city and what impact their feeding has on the human population, so they can keep things under wraps. What I discovered in play is that this isn't enough. Due to the action of the plot, I was aware not only of the arrivals of itinerant vampires from various places who checked in, but also that there members of the population who had gone missing. This poses a problem; I can't asses the impact of feeding if I don't know whether someone is still here, is dead, or has left etc. As a result, I started getting in contact with the Princes of neighbouring cities to see if they were of so-and-so entering their territory, which would at least firm up my own numbers.
This is not a historical example, but is I think analogous becuase it demonstrates how, by engaging with the problems of fictional people in fictional worlds, you can learn something about them. It is this principle I am especially interested in extending to historical contexts, although the opportunity is few and far between, not least because of RPG's concentration on OTT magic and kewl powerz and all that jazz, none of which interests me much. If I played V:tM again as GM, I would certainly incorporate this insight into how I portrayed Princes and their concerns. Also, being engaged with this sort of thing made me a much more active player, with my own concerns, trying to get certain kinds of things done. That, too, is an element I'd like to extend. Sure, when you're wandering from room to room in a dungeon there is no need for that sort of proactivity, or indeed when going from encounter to encounter in a plot. But when I had ownership over my characters own place in the imaginary world, stuff to do and worry about appeared organically.
I found all of this interesting and entertaining. I really can't say that any of this impinged upon what Simon descibes as themes of human concern; they were procedural and practical. But they were more than enough to sustain engaging play, and it is one of the games I remember most fondly.
David Berg:
What did the other players do while you were figuring out how to be an effective Prince?
contracycle:
They were my assistants, so I sent them to do stuff, find out things, etc. Plus, because I was self-driven, I didn't take uo a lot of the GM's time, and he could therefore use a lot of it on personal plots for them. Probably a fair bit of what they did may have gone against my wishes, but it was coinducted between them and the GM. In addition, there was a conventional plot uniting the characters; as mentioned, this was not initially built as a game intended to have a PC prince.
David Berg:
Ah, interesting. So they got to kind of act as your extended senses and the instruments of your experiments while you were learning how to be a good Prince? So that kept you interested in what they were doing? Presumably, they weren't just interested in helping you be a better Prince. So the shared fun seems contingent on the stuff they were interested in doubling as Prince-intel. Is that correct?
I'm looking for alternatives to human concerns / themes as far as glue that keeps people interested in each other's play. So I'm curious about whether your Prince stuff was a weird, momentary aberration, or something sustainable.
Lance D. Allen:
Gareth,
I think further specific discussion of this V:tM game may derail a thread that may be winding down to conclusion.. But I find myself very interested in further discussion and dissection of it, and it appears that maybe David is as well. Would you be willing to start another thread to talk about this?
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