What Does Sharing Narrative Control Show?
Cliff H:
In another thread I spoke about the odd ways in which my players would use the limited narrative control I handed them to gimp their own characters. Over the past two sessions I had an opportunity to try something different with them, and it's been revealing. I'm just not sure what it revealed.
I'd been hammered in real life, and was left with little time to prep our game, so I tried a trick I read in John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors, which has the players script the adventure and then hands it to the GM to muck with. The idea here is that the players perform legwork prior to hitting a mission, and the GM gets to mess with the details by claiming bad intel.
We're currently playing 7th Sea, and the group belongs to a secret order of church assassins clearly based on the Templars. To date, however, they've not had an assassination mission. I figured one of those would fit the bill for this kind of adventure setup perfectly, and rather than make it overly involved, their first time out could be a reasonably vanilla run. So I made the basic objective: assassinate those gathering to set up a smuggling ring, and make it look like someone else did it. I created the ring leader and left everything else in their hands.
They huddled up and passed ideas around for most the session. By the end of the night, they handed me their list. I had to do a double take and ask "Really?"
"Oh yeah!"
They handed me a list of 10 separate targets, each of whom had some sorcerous or technological power that was special. All of them had entourages ranging from 10 to 30 men, and one of them was a local government official. This was far more than I would have put them up against, but they seemed pretty enthusiastic, so I said okay, have at it. There was some head scratching once they had to face their own opposition, and though one party member never gave up on the idea that they could just storm the meeting with everyone in attendence and slaughter them all in a grand melee, the eventual plan was to split up and attack four of the members en route to the meeting, and converge at the spot where they'd take on the rest as a party.
Because they were splitting up, and because they had created these people they were going after, I decided to hand play control of the NPCs to those players not currently playing someone "on camera." When needed I told the players what dice were available for the NPCs, based on quick approximations of their descriptions, and otherwise let them run the show themselves.
Two sessions later, only one target was dead, and that assassin was captured alive (because he stuck around to fight all the guards who showed up, even though he had a free round to dive out a window without being seen). Another was insane. Someone else had a broken sword arm, and the last was now a wanted man throughout the city, with a description and name floating around. This was only from the solo missions; no one's gotten to the meeting yet, and two of the four players won't be showing up to that, obviously.
What I noticed was that when the players got the control of the game, they stopped being goofy. There was no tripping over untied shoes or any such thing. Failures were greeted with a quick nod or maybe a "Damn," and play moved on. But the other thing that came out was how amazingly vicious they were to one another. One player went out of his way to kill a player character when he was playing the bad guys, and it's hard to die in 7th Sea. Another time, players playing the part of guards began asking reasonable but very sharp questions of one of the would be assassins trying to make his way toward his target.
In my games, I have a reputation for being out to get my PCs, but I have never put them in situations like this. To be completely fair, I don't think they realized what they were getting themselves into at first, but even when it became apparent, there was no backing off, and if anything they got rougher with each other as we moved around the table and dealt with each solo foray. My quesiton is this: is this indicative of gamist play? Between the way they went for the throat when handed control, and the one character's refusal to leave when he had the chance until he took out every single guard in the compound, it certainly began to look like a game where they were trying to win against some standard, be it each other or a kill count.
The other question is: if this is gamist play, what can I do with that information?
Cliff H:
I should clarify my last question. Clearly, if my players are gamist, then they'd enjoy seeing a more competitive element to the game. Seeing as how I'm most interested in character exploration and transformation though, is there a game, method, or anecdote that can help bridge this divide?
I realize this might be trying to accomplish narrativist and gamist play at the same time, which doesn't work, but given that any method can tell a good story, I'm hoping there's a way to do that enough to give me my jollies as well.
Eero Tuovinen:
With the usual reservations about my psychic powers and their ability to divine what others are thinking based on textual descriptions, what I would be thinking myself were I one of your players and acting that way would not be gamist thoughts; rather, I would be putting my character up against serious, colorful threats and heroic, impossible challenges for dramatic reasons. If our characters are heroic assassins and the GM explicitly gave me the task of prepping some adversity, it wouldn't occur to me to make this adversity commonplace, boring or minor in the setting. The mere fact that I'm given the chance to set up some adversity pretty much means that I have to make it memorable and unique - what would be the point of deviating from normal procedure if I was expected to turn in something common?
The process of play itself sounds to me like it's very rooted in the internal logic of the fiction: the things the players do in your tale are nothing I wouldn't do just to express my vision of the fiction when I've bought into the fiction in the first place. Thus it's not a given that the players are fucking up each other's characters for gamist, challenge-based oneupmanship reasons. It could be, of course, but it wouldn't probably be why I'd do those things in that campaign you describe.
Callan S.:
Hi Cliff,
To me it sounds gamist, rather than trying to be faithful to genre for the sake of being faithful to genre. Particularly that example of the player playing the bad guys trying to kill the other players PC, going out of his way to do it. Particularly that 'kill every fucker in the room' guard take down attempt.
I'll throw in a side comment about 'gamist', as in it sounds like a series of mini games with fictional relation between them, rather than one, big game. But that's just stating it to make the distinction.
I think you can gear shift between gamism and nar, but for the love of god don't try to do it non explicitly and just somehow convey it purely in scene description! I'd actually recommend being as blunt as saying 'Okay, were stopping adventure mode and now this is drama mode' then latter 'okay, drama mode is over - adventure mode now!' and so on (I'm trying to avoid forge jargon - I think everyone kind of gets adventure and drama to some degree). I know it sounds blunt, but this is actually using the explicit clutch to shift gears.
So I think you can get your jollies too, but the shift between each is going to be (necessarily) obvious.
Also this is just a shift to which comes first as the most important thing were doing in the moment of play. You'd probably find nar like stuff sits in the background of the gamist play. But it just doesn't come first. I'd say it's a bit like Asimov's rules of robotics - which priority/rule comes first and overides the rest is the important one and the rest it's bitches. But it probably sounds confusing to say that!
masqueradeball:
If I were a player, and it was the first time the GM had me take authority for the antagonism, especially if I hadn't run a lot of games myself... I would probably go too strong just to make sure that I didn't go too soft. So many players are taught from various game text that "meta-gaming" is the most evil thing in RPG's, so, if for a second they do anything that the bad-guys "wouldn't do" is cheating, so, if this guy would is a guard he's "got to" ask hard questions, if he's an evil smuggler he's "got to" go for the kill...
Of course I'm just saying what I would do (and have experienced myself), but it seems like it might be part of the equation. I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of all three of these factors (wanting it to be dramatic (Eero), wanting to win (Callan) and wanting to "play right" (myself)) all contribute to the problem.
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