Odd Narrative Habits
Cliff H:
I've got a group of players that all got into the hobby in the 80s, meaning that they all cut their teeth originally on some flavor of D&D, and much of our formative gaming experience was with games that relied heavily on early D&D mechanical design. Since that time we've had plenty of opportunities to broaden our horizons, and have played plenty of other games that have little to do with D&D in either story or resolution mechanics. As my own taste in game design becomes more refined over time, I, as the group's sole regular GM, have tried pushing the group toward a more collective narrative play style. The reasons for that involve plenty of game theory of the sort I've read here, but they're not relevant to this discussion, so I'll save them for another thread. My players have taken to this hesitantly, since they feel games are my stories and they are there to enjoy them, not write them. Again, a topic for another post.
So what's this post about? It's about what they do when they do take narrative control. For some reason, the one time they feel 100% comfortable describing the outcome of a situation resolved in part by rolling dice (or whatever other resolution mechanic the game in question uses) is in describing failure. And in this, it's the same every single time, regardless of what game we're playing or what they're character is like.
And it is universally dignity-stripping, ridiculous failure. Even when there's a fumble mechanic in the game (something I usually avoid), when my players fail, but don't in fact fumble, they feel the need to not only fail, but suck.
Fail a spot check? "I'm drooling on my shoes while trying to count my toes."
Fail a stealth roll? "I get my foot caught in a bucket and bang it against the wall while singing the stealthy song."
I've got lots of these, but I think you get the idea.
I've actually used my station as GM to overwrite this a few times, saying "No, you're just didn't notice anything," and have even outright said that failure need not reduce the character to a bad sidekick, but for some reason my players feel the need to utterly debase their characters. It's as if the only way they're comfortable truly captaining their own destiny is when making their characters into punchlines. Anything else is too dire. They won't narrate their actions in combat; they certainly don't embellish their successful rolls in this way.
And I should mention I have never run a campaign in which this kind of slapstick fits. The plots of my games tend to be serious, and I'm not at all shy about having bad things happen to PCs and NPCs alike to push buttons. Thus, introducing this kind of detail isn't for the sake of further flavoring the game. By all their other actions, no one wants to play a laughing stock, but they seem compelled to force the issue whenever their dice come up short.
While I have a pretty consistent group of people I game with, the games I run usually only have a sampling of the total group; tastes have rarefied and in some cases calcified to the point where I can't find a single game that all agree to play. So, depending on what it is I'm running, I'll have a different group composition. Everyone brings his own style, often radically different, but in this, it's absolutely consistent.
Now, I do have this half-baked idea that this might come from our one root commonality in gaming: early D&D, in which character viability was something you grew into rather than started with. I'd long since moved on from D&D by the time I met my current group, and indeed played Red Box (and Blue Box, and even Green once) with many different people. This kind of narrative control over failure seemed to be something that came out a lot in those games, specifically the early levels where failure was so much more prevalent. Maybe it's something we all learned early and they've been unable to let go of, or maybe I'm just seeing something that's not there.
Regardless, I find it exceedingly odd that the players are only willing to take narrative control to effectively pants their own characters. Has anyone else run into this? More specifically, have you found any technique that helps to break this reflex?
Ron Edwards:
Welcome to the Forge, Cliff!
I confess you have baffled me. Not in the sense of making no sense - you described it perfectly, and I've seen the same thing in lesser, less group-specific form. But baffled in the sense of understanding it, at least not without a long think.
Anyone, help!
Best, Ron
David Shockley:
Obviously I don't know your group, or the groups Ron referred to, so I could be way off base. But this strikes me as a pretty straightforward example of Creative Agenda in action. I'm not sure how versed in the CA concept you are, but the idea that CA is what you intend to do, or that CA is what a specific person prefers to do, are both common misconceptions. CA is how you use the medium of play to enjoy the game _together_. It doesn't matter how invested in Lothar the badass barbarian, and his epic struggle to avenge his fallen village a player is, its not a part of CA until its enthusiastically shared and reinforced by the group. If everyones eyes glaze over when you talk about Lothar (perhaps not out of fundamental disinterest, but because we all know it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference), but they all grin or laugh when you have him trip over his feet and fall into a hole when you roll a 2 on your spot check... Then thats what you are going to do.
In the essays Ron talks about how Sim is easily supplanted by the more basic human activities of competition (gamism) and story telling (narrativism), but Sim-comedy seems to be just as basic and powerful.
Narration mechanics are a technique, that can support any agenda based on the context. In this game, they are supporting the Sim-comedy agenda. If you don't want to support it, I'd suggest removing or refocusing the mechanic. Honestly, what sort of failure narration would matter to the other players at the table? If the answer is none, then its not a useful rule.
Cliff H:
Thanks for pointing me toward the Creative Agenda article, David. It's a term I've seen bandied about in the forum, but not something about which I've specifically read. I've got two weeks before my next session, so I'll have plenty of time to absorb the material, and maybe instead of a game next time we gather, we'll set a mutually agreed upon creative agenda instead (our games are on weeknights, and only last a couple of hours because of that).
As to the other point you reference, I'll admit that I'm still getting used to what games other than Gamist games are really like. I'm familiar withe the way games break down in the G/N/S model, but I myself never owned or read anything other than the standard sem-mixed but gamist-heavy design that many of the big titles tend to be. It's only in the past year that I've gotten a taste for what real narrative games are like, where the fortune mechanic is used not to determine the outcome, but who gets to determine the outcome.
However, as to how narrative tools are used in my own game, they're not specific to failure. In fact, there's no mechanic about narrating failure at all, but there is in regards to narrating success. I'm currently running a 7th Sea campaign that has some Cthulhian Mythos elements added (by request). For the most part it's by the book in terms of rules. However, I replaced the standard raise mechanic with the one John Wick introduced with Houses of the Blooded (I got tired of people forgetting to raise but still insisting on rolling out every last 10 and spending 3 minutes tallying up results as high as 60-somthing when a 15 would do).
If you're not familiar with it, in a nutshell you have a basic target number and a pool of dice. Roll your dice and add them up. If you beat the TN, you succeed marginally. You want to do better? You raise. To raise, you remove one die from your pool before rolling. You can raise as much as you like, removing as many dice as you like. For each die that you remove, you either increase the quality of your success by one degree, or, as in the case of many non-combat rolls, you get to add one detail to the circumstances of your success.
As you can see, this system gives much greater narrative control to those rolls that succeed, not fail. So it's not like I've introduced a new mechanic to the game that specifically encourages the players to make utter goofs of themselves. If anything, it allows them to be badass in the specific manner most pleasing to them, provided they play to their strengths and take the risk of raising.
This idea of a creative agenda however, that resonates. We did not sit down and mutually agree what the game would be like together, not explicitly anyway. We did agree to the system and the inclusion of Lovecraftian elements, which I thought did an excellent job of summing up what it would be like but this could be a prime example of the danger of assumptions.
Thanks very much for that tip. I'm off to do some reading.
Dan Maruschak:
I've seen this a bit, too. Here's the hypothesis I've been working with: Narrating slapstick failure is usually very safe and easy. Since you failed in trying to do something the scope of fiction that you'll affect with the narration tends to be small. Since there's little chance that you'll affect the status quo with your narration, you don't feel the pressure of authorial responsibility that you would if you were going to "move the story forward" like you would when narrating a success. Further, since you already know the negative mechanical result of what happened (i.e. one failed roll) there's little "danger" in narrating something bad happening to your character because the bad thing has already happened. With few other pressures operating, the draw of getting a cheap laugh is pretty compelling, so you narrate slapstick to get a chuckle out of your friends. Also, the common case in RPGs if for PCs to be hypercompetent, and failure in the context of hypercompetent characters is something that easily lends itself to comedy.
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