Making the transition from mission based play?
JB:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=of734dlu4p338e246v3ajn2qb4apksc7&topic=29547.msg275043#msg275043
JB:
[Bah. Sorry about the empty starter post. Something odd happened there and with editing off I can't fix it. Actual intended text below.]
So, I was particularly struck by Ron's observations about 'mission based stories' in the Legendary Lives thread.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.phpPHPSESSID=of734dlu4p338e246v3ajn2qb4apksc7&topic=29547.msg275043#msg275043:
From those points one can draw a fairly accurate description of the games I've been playing in over the last year or so.
This isn't to say these aren't fun games; they are. Within the frame of mission based scenarios, things are generally well handled: there's usually a decent amount of communication between players and the GM regarding the 'motivation & setup' for the mission so the characters do actually have a reason to go do whatever, and the 'whatever' they have to do is generally entertaining.
However, as Ron infers, this type of play isn't particularly conducive to generating the kind of play that produces the kind of 'character driven stories through assertive player participation'.
After reading Ron's post, it occurs to me that at least part of the problem is that although people may want this kind of play, we don't, as a group, really know how to get it.
One of the biggest obstacles I'm seeing is a lack of awareness of any other options for scenario structure beyond the 'group mission' thing, to the point that scenario=mission. Prepping a game means coming up with a mission and working out how to get the PCs involved, and polling players as Ron described.
So, to Ron in particular but everyone in general, any advice and/or techniques for moving away from the 'mission based story'?
Jim
(Another obstacle to character driven play has to do with some 'floundering' in regards to Players knowing how to create characters with 'potential' for character driven stories and GMs knowing what to do with them if they do. I feel that's somewhat tangental right now, but I'm not opposed to addressing that as well, either here or in another thread.)
Eero Tuovinen:
Me, me, pick me! This is definitely my topic. I even wrote a game, Zombie Cinema, to address this point.
To be more useful, I think that the party and mission are a big obstacle to dramatic play, just like you said. As a practical point one of the first things to do here is to get rid of the party - once you don't have a party you'll find that even if you still have missions, they tend to be rather more cross-purposes with each other, and therefore not real missions. So get rid of the party and assume that all characters have independent concerns and their own scenes, that'll get you 70% there.
Of course the big issue with not having a party is that players will have to sit around watching as others play. This is the big methodological shift in play, not because the GM has to do something difficult, but because it requires the players to adjust their attitudes to play. All players will have to learn how to be audience to each other and how to appreciate the scenes of play in which their own characters are not present. It also means that the entire group will have to learn to be economic about time - you can't forget yourself and waste an hour going through a dialogue with the shopkeeper when you have scene allotments to consider and other players sitting on their thumbs.
A big conclusion I've made about the practical transition to dramatic, character-driven play is that you need to accept that not every player in the group is going to be able to perform the skills required equally. In party-based play this isn't so flagrant, as the more passive players will get dragged along by the crowd, but in character-based play you'll find that some players just have dull characters with no interesting motivations except perhaps a general sort of destructive confrontationalism towards other player characters. There are different strategies in how to handle this; my latest favourite, one I explored in the World of Near, is to allow players to play sidekicks to the actual protagonists. That is, instead of trying to get everybody to make characters fit to the protagonistical requirements of a given game, you might consider allowing a player to make a less important character who doesn't have to participate in anything, really. This way the player gets to do their thing while the rest of the group engages in the character-driven play. Just like when they're part of a party, except the party is just smaller when it's just him and his protagonist. (Note that you can't do this in all games; TSoY allows this due to the game's traditional flexibility in set-up, while something like Sorcerer won't really be equipped to give a sidekick player a meaningful interface into the game.)
Zombie Cinema, as I mentioned, is my school of hard knocks for teaching well-intending but clueless people how to play dramatic characters. Just hit it until your character stops getting consistently eaten by zombies. Another approach that I worked on around the late '90s (and which I really should revive, now that I think about it) is to set up your campaign around a single protagonist character which you'll give to your most dependably drama-driven player to play. You still have a party, but that party is not directed by missions - it's directed by its leader who in turn has big, dramatic goals. Like Robin Hood. The trick here is that presumably other players might find it unequal that this one guy is the only one who gets an important character; for this reason you need to have flexible opportunity in the game for other characters to develop into co-protagonists as well, perhaps breaking out of the party to go their own, independent way. This sort of thing is perfectly feasible in TSoY or Solar System due to how the game already supports both sidekick characters and protagonists.
contracycle:
Just a caveat: it's quite possible to play without a mission-based structure without going as far as 'character driven stories through assertive player participation'. It is not a binary condition. It's perfectly possible to have character driven play that is not oriented around anything to do with story as such.
Erik Weissengruber:
Houses of the Blooded has Dungeon Crawls!
In managing your Ven's domain, you pick season actions. One of these can be to explore a ruin. So you and your eldritch pals leap into a dungeon and despoil it.
It's fun and can help your Ven get sorcerous goodies.
And it's all resolved in a few rolls.
So, having a game where characters go on missions is perfectly fun. But the large-scale arc of the game is not about missions; missions are undertaken to aid/set/affect long term goals.
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