Odd Narrative Habits
David Shockley:
The essays are pretty interesting material, but I think Frostfolk and GNS aggravation is a much better resource for understanding Creative Agenda. At least, this was the thread that clarified the topic for me.
Quote from: Cliff H on December 31, 2010, 09:41:05 PM
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.
If this is actually about CA, then this may be more relevant than you initially assumed. It sounds to me that you are dissatisfied with how your group plays. Which could very well be because your group doesn't have a strong/coherent CA operating when you play, or just that it has one that clashes with your personal preferences.
Ron Edwards:
God this is interesting.
OK, here are some disconnected notions and observations. First, one thing that always struck me in 1980s play in particular was how savagely various GMs narrated failed actions. It was supposed to be part of the fun.
One of the most influential moments of my gaming history came in ... um ... 1986, I think; we were playing Rolemaster,* and the GM's fiancee had been convinced, against much reluctance, to be in "his story," cast as the heroine. And so in our first big all-together-now fight scene in some muddy fantasy-city street, she goes ahead and rolls regarding her character doing some kind of acrobatic tumble across the fighting, and fails. Now, this was Rolemaster, the king system for exquisitely maiming and humiliating your character, but I don't recall that an egregious failure-upon-fumble-upon-critical combo occurred this time. I do recall that the GM described how her character stumbled, prat-fell (prat-falled?), hit the mud face-first, and skidded in a glorious spectacle of fuck-you-stupid. He described it in detail. With pleasure, including how ridiculous her character looked when she stood up with mud all over her. With fun, as if this were the kind of thing we all should be living for. I clearly saw hatred of this game, of role-playing, and of the rest of us collectively appear on the player's face, in that order, and without the successive layers obscuring the earlier ones.
Yet just a couple of years later, we** were playing Champions, with me GMing, and the villain Raptor was confronting the heroes, and this was the session in which Chris, a new player, had brought his new character into the game, the intriguing Insecto. During the fight, the speedy and agile hero Runaround tried to leap across the river of cockroaches surrounding Raptor, as I recall to attack. Matt, the player, rolled an 18 on 3d6, the worst roll in Champions. The system has no fumble mechanic, but we often used 3's and 18's as cues for extra-colorful narration. Also, we narrated more-or-less ad-lib, i.e., whoever spoke first and/or best saw his or her words cemented into the fiction. Matt looked at the three 6's, groaned and laughed at the same time, and said, "I trip so bad that it looks like I lie down onto the cockroaches, and Raptor walks across my body to the other side." We all cried out in joy and accepted that narration.***
Why was one so fucking horrid (for everyone, except the oblivious boyfriend/GM) and the other so perfectly fun? There are a lot of factors. For one thing, in the Champions game, we were accustomed to seeing Runaround routinely succeed in classic comics-speedster and Jackie-Chan like moves, so the failure brought out a certain human element to the character. Whereas in the Rolemaster game, this was literally the first roll made by that player; it was at that moment the sole context and by default, the characterizing introduction, for the character.
For another, it tied into Insecto's successful entry into the story and game as a whole, pointing out that the newcomer had done something rather tactically sound whereas the veteran screwed it up. Whereas in the Rolemaster game, again, it lacked all context except for the idea that this character is simply a goofus. I mean, her action didn't relate to the other characters' actions particularly.
For yet another, as I'm sure many of us here are familiar with, there does occur a strange association between the number you roll on polyhedra and your personal qualities as a ... I dunno, as a person, as a player. I have myself chortled, "You suck" to fellow players upon their rolling poorly. Yet, and I don't know if my experience matches others', this association seems restricted to classic gaming fantasy and doesn't crop up as much, or as severely, or even at all, in other genres. It didn't show up in our Champions play at all. Now, we as a group did not respond like that when Ann (the Rolemaster player) rolled poorly at that moment. But maybe the GM was operating from that school of thought/play (Social Contract, actually), and it makes sense in terms of socio-gaming history - you couldn't get more old-school original D&D(s) than him.
I'm holding off on the Creative Agenda talk, mainly because I'd like to know more about the group and the game before going there. But so far nothing has been said about it that I disagree with; in fact, David's summary post about CA was wonderful to read.
Best, Ron
* My character's name was Asrovir d'Ursini, a black-clad, outlawed nobleman with a rapier, specializing in darkness and pain magic. Can you stand it?
** Editing this in: "we" in the Champions group included some overlap with the Rolemaster group, including the GM (who was a player), me (the Champs GM), and Matt, who had un-enjoyed the Rolemaster game as much as I had. But not the fiancee, no indeed. The two groups were so different in Social Contract and general aesthetics that the Rolemaster-GM guy might as well have been a different person.
*** Note that Matt included the villain's actions in his narration, including movement which was "free" in what is otherwise a very strictured system regarding movement. In other words, to him and to us, the poor roll and opportunity for colorful narration overrode the movement rules as well as any assumption or assertion that the "players play their characters and the GM plays everyone and everything else." Not that we noticed it at the time.
Callan S.:
Hi Cliff,
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"I get my foot caught in a bucket and bang it against the wall while singing the stealthy song."
*actual lol*
It could be alot of things, so I'll suggest just one possibility to consider, which may not apply. But it sounds like something I or my group might do at times.
Basically the thing is, it does not undercut the challenge or adversity of the scene. Indeed it'd probably add to it.
Narrating yourself into winning suuuuuucks. Yeah, you rolled to hit and passed, but adding on extra good stuff to the pass? Suuuucks.
That or if you can't narrate extra good stuff onto a pass, what's the point of narrating at all? What, narrate about how good your characters hair looks? Bah!
But fails - fails, you can A: Be funny, B: Not undercut adversity C: Add to the scene through narration, which is fun to do, without screwing up on A or B.
What's worse for you is that you kind of don't seem to want this - ironically this gives the ideal stage for this stuff. Why my group doesn't do this all the time? Because the GM would leap upon the details like a hungry raptor and D: Take over the narration (bah) and E: use the details to screw you way more than you said (much like D; bah!). While you, because you don't really want these pratfall narrations, don't do A or B - and so in leaving them untouched, actually empower the players in completing D and E.
Basically if it is this, it is fun to pursue. I get a sort of cringe feeling from when you say 'I've moved on from D&D', because it sounds like your working in terms of what is superior, rather than what you find fun (I'll totally grant one could cease to find D&D fun, but that's different from 'moving on' from it).
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"I trip so bad that it looks like I lie down onto the cockroaches, and Raptor walks across my body to the other side."
*actual lol*
I disagree with Ron that it was fictional context or social contract (as an applied thing/tool) or whatever non player/person thing that makes that differ from the sucky version. I'd say it was simply that the player was in charge of hosing himself (if I'm reading right, Matt is playing Runaround). It's like how you can dis your relatives, but other people can't. Exact same principle here - you can trash your own character/your own artistic extension, and it works fine. It's not enabled by fictional context or whatever. It's just a people thing (you can build rules around it, but it's a nuance of human psychology). Or so I'd hypothesize.
Couple of possibilities to mull over with the rest, there :)
Cliff H:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 01, 2011, 07:11:45 PM
OK, here are some disconnected notions and observations. First, one thing that always struck me in 1980s play in particular was how savagely various GMs narrated failed actions. It was supposed to be part of the fun.
Now that takes me back. I remember once when we were giving D&D 3.0 a try and one of my friends at the time requested a magic item that granted wishes. I said I'd work it in, but that I wasn't going to play the "old game" in which I'd try to delve into the minutia of a stated wish with the specific intention of screwing over the person making the wish. The player's reaction? He booed me at the table. The fact that he wanted to be messed with, probably severely, was never anything I understood. I'd have indulged him though, had a change of employers not necessitated he move beyond reasonable commute distance from the rest of us.
Quote
I do recall that the GM described how her character stumbled, prat-fell (prat-falled?), hit the mud face-first, and skidded in a glorious spectacle of fuck-you-stupid. He described it in detail. With pleasure, including how ridiculous her character looked when she stood up with mud all over her. With fun, as if this were the kind of thing we all should be living for. I clearly saw hatred of this game, of role-playing, and of the rest of us collectively appear on the player's face, in that order, and without the successive layers obscuring the earlier ones.
Now this takes me back a little further, and to something directly tied to the issue I described in my original post. Many, though not all, of the people I game with now were people I gamed with in college. As such, we have a lot of collective gaming history. In that morass of experience is an almost universally shared, long running Shadowrun campaign. It ran for years, sort of. The GM was running Shadowrun for about 3 of our 4 years together, but the roster of characters routinely changed, since he ran a meat grinder worthy of the Tomb of Horrors. And it wasn't just tough opposition and his insane luck with dice. This game was famous for the random dicking you'd get. Like the time someone said he was taking a quick walk outside to get some air after an in character argument.
The GM rolled randomly to see if he ran into a street gang. He did.
The GM then rolled randomly (on what chart, I have no idea) to see what kind of armament the gang was packing. Huh, weird. Seems they have mortars with white phosphorous shells with higher skills and more chrome than our entire veteran group put together.
More than that, though, were the narrated failures. All our failures were the embarrassing, dignity-robbing sort, but instead of we players describing them, they were handed to us by the GM, much like the Rolemaster story Ron cites. In fact, "the stealthy song" is an artifact from those days, which players have appropriated and continue to use themselves to this day.
I hated that. Given that even showing up to a meet to get the mission that was the Shadowrun adventure involved putting your life on the line, the added indignity of being made a fool right before you died was something that really rubbed me raw. Still, it was the biggest game in town, and the GM was my roommate, so I hung in there for much longer than my sense of fun did. I eventually left though.
Now, my own players have a sense of paranoia about them, and I've heard many a comment about "how Cliff's going to use this to fuck us," but I draw a clear line in my own head on this. What they refer to as fucking, I call consequence. I like my players to feel that their actions can mean something, so I make sure what they do has repercussions, good and bad. This does come back to haunt them sometimes. Other times, they have happy happenstance because of a prior decision. But I never, ever, randomly fuck them because of a whiffed roll. I remember how effectively that turned an entire game to crap for me (I imagine I often wore the look of the aforementioned muddy fiancée), and would never dream of doing it to someone else. So, yeah, I'm all about bringing pain to a PC, especially if it puts them in a position that might force the player to make a decision that reveals more about the character, but I'd never want to visit abject humiliation on them because of a random element.
And besides, they seem perfectly happy doing this to themselves.
As to the ribbing for bad die rolls, I've seen it. I've received plenty of it too, since my own dice hate me like they all own a dog and I've systematically kicked them all. However, I can't remember this kind of thing cropping up much lately. There's plenty of yelling "you suck!" at the dice themselves. That just happened last week, in fact. A lot. But the players seem to be pretty sympathetic and even helpful in that regard, offering reminders about whatever mechanics might help boost the results, give re-rolls, etc. When that fails, they even swap dice around in the hopes that luck might change hands. That's near-unique behavior. Most other groups I've been in don't want you even breathing on their dice.
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I'm holding off on the Creative Agenda talk, mainly because I'd like to know more about the group and the game before going there. But so far nothing has been said about it that I disagree with; in fact, David's summary post about CA was wonderful to read.
I'm going to have to swallow some pride here and say that I require more time to read and digest all of the associated info I dug up when I began to look into this. I started with the article on Narrativist play, but that left me feeling like to get the whole picture I needed to read the articles on Simulationist and Gamist play as well, and then David dropped a link providing an example of social contract analysis (which is wonderfully illuminating, as I understand things primarily through example). I think it might be a Creative Agenda issue, given that I see a lot of the symptoms in my group that Ron attributes to groups with an incoherent CA, but I want to get a tighter grasp on the material before I make any deductions there.
Quote from: Callan S. on January 01, 2011, 07:59:27 PM
That or if you can't narrate extra good stuff onto a pass, what's the point of narrating at all? What, narrate about how good your characters hair looks? Bah!
My turn for an actual lol, and I mean that seriously. One of my players has a thing about hair. Every single one of his characters has fabulous hair, and he's forever asking for bonuses to any social roll because "hey, the hair's just that good." If ever there's an appearance edge in the game, he's got it, and it's explained by his hair. Every time, without fail.
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What's worse for you is that you kind of don't seem to want this - ironically this gives the ideal stage for this stuff.
You're quite right. I don't. At least not all the time. It really depends on what we're playing. For some games it's fine. But other times it's a mood breaker. Even if the scene's not weighty or laced with horror or any of that, there are times when that kind of failure just seems to break the tone of the emerging narrative.
I said above that I work best with examples. I'll give you two quick ones from the last session we had. The game is a lightly modified 7th Sea with some Cthulhu material added in (I wrote some sanity rules that dovetailed with the existing engine). The party often begins by going on what appears to be an Indiana Jones-style archeological adventure, but discovers something sinister about the artifact in question along the way and wild adventure gives way to lurking horror as they close in on their find. It was something I pitched to the group, but that we all sat down and worked out together before
anyone made characters.
EXAMPLE #1
So, last session saw them all kinds of chewed up after a big fight. A major NPC villain, one they justly fear, is about to arrive on the scene, and they decide to split up. One man heads back to his ship to warn the crew, the other two hide where they are so they can see what the villain wants in this area. The villain shows up, and does indeed pay particular attention to something. One of the players asks to make a perception check to see what it is, and blows his roll. Instead of peering at whatever it was that the villain was looking at, he decides to stare directly into the sun for as long as he can without blinking.
Now this was after a session in which the party began to unravel the true scope of the supernatural evil they've encountered a few other places. It also bears mentioning that this villain is something of a big deal in this game. Every time they see his ship, even if it's just in port, they immediately make sure to find everyone in the party and let them know Reis is in port, so maybe they should stay on the ship and let the NPCs get provisions. In my mind, this should have been a tense moment. There was the artifact gone wrong sitting in a clearing, and the nemesis that overmatches them by ridiculous amounts (for now) is so close to one of them that they can hear him breathe. This is not the time for slapstick.
EXAMPLE #2
Fast forward just a little bit. Pirate villain Reis has discovered the PCs and some quick talking on their part gets them a reprieve. He has the remaining villagers drag the massive artifact into the sea, since he seems more interested in destroying it than taking it, and then proceeds to feed those same villagers, women and children mostly, to the sea monsters that follow his ship.
Upon returning to their own ship, the party tried to convince one of their crew not to publish the results of the expedition in an academic paper (the point of the whole expedition), since that was part of the deal they struck with Reis. One of the players rolls to persuade and fails. He asks if the man is married, and if she's hot. No? How about his mother? Is she hot. It wasn't a threat; he was trolling for women, and his tone made it obvious.
Had this happened earlier in the adventure, when things were still bright and the proceedings were still more like Indiana Jones and less like Curse of the Black Freighter, this would be fine. But to have this kind of failure happen right after seeing the wholesale slaughter of a large number of people feels absolutely incongruous to me. More curious still, this same player who made this gaffe was willing to sacrifice his life to save the villagers if he could figure out a way to do it. The rest of the party had to talk him out of making a last stand against the pirate crew, so it's not like he wasn't taking it seriously at the time.
I think of it like this: what if one of the sailors who found R'yleh in Call of Cthulhu split his pants as he climbed off the ship? That little detail doesn't need to change any of the events that occur in the rest of the scene, but it certainly pulls away from the intent of the story as a whole to have some guy flashing his briefs through a slit in his seat.
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Why my group doesn't do this all the time? Because the GM would leap upon the details like a hungry raptor and D: Take over the narration (bah) and E: use the details to screw you way more than you said (much like D; bah!). While you, because you don't really want these pratfall narrations, don't do A or B - and so in leaving them untouched, actually empower the players in completing D and E.
That's an interesting idea, and one I hadn't considered since I was so caught up in trying to preserve the mood. Normally I don't like really putting the screws to characters in random situations like this, but if they're handing it to me.... Certainly worth a trial run in the lab.
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I get a sort of cringe feeling from when you say 'I've moved on from D&D', because it sounds like your working in terms of what is superior, rather than what you find fun (I'll totally grant one could cease to find D&D fun, but that's different from 'moving on' from it).
Poor choice of verbiage on my part. I certainly meant no qualitative judgement in that. It's true, my tastes have turned away from D&D, in all its editions, but that's because I'm not fond of tactical combat on battlemats, and I burned out on build discussions. But I acknowledge that this sort of thing really hits the spot for some. Hell, back in the 3.5 days I was a regular contributor to Dragon, and I still like the implied stories behind a well designed prestige class or paragon path. But the things I really look for in a game, like hard choices and character growth through pain, tend to get overshadowed by games that emphasize combat and that give hundreds of fiddly bits designed for that arena. So, no, the game doesn't suck, but it's not my thing anymore.
Thank you everyone for the replies so far. This has turned into a much larger and deeper discussion than I would have ever guessed this one question would generate or, indeed, warrant. But it continues to be fascinating and illuminates my games and group than expected.
NN:
Are you absolutely sure the players like the setting? Slapstick seems to be an opposite to Lovecraftian.
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