decoupling Reward Systems from broad-scale Story Arcs
contracycle:
Some points based on the above.
A planned story doesn't necessarily need to be total. So it would be quite possible to constrain the whole story of "how the ring was brought to Mt Doom" and then leave the decision to throw it in or not to players or system or a mix of both. What would happen then is essentially a bunch of special effects that play out as the credits roll.
On a similar note, it is possible to do branching plans, but this is usually sub-optimal because it means that some amount of prep will not be used. As such it's quite an inefficient method for someone writing for themselves and their group, but I should mention that this problem goes away when the writer is a third party, providing material to multiple groups. So maybe game1 has a branch decision at the end, and you follow it on with game A or game B depending on which branch your group decided to take. If the person writing these is in the same relationship as a module writer of old, selling their work to various groups depending on what choice they made, then the branches won't be wasted after all.
Filip Luszczyk:
Quote from: David Berg on October 21, 2011, 10:32:40 AM
Early in my roleplaying career, I tried to use my GM position to tell my stories, and though there were many times when that didn't go so well, there were some times where it went really well for everyone involved. I know I got something unique out of it, and I think the players did too. So I'm convinced that functional possibilities do exist in this direction. How hard they are to design for is another question.
Everyone, I'd prefer that we keep the focus on the "designing for" part here in this thread, please.
As for designing. Do you know that even today people are using this time-proven medium to tell stories to small immediate audiences? Seems like you are designing with this specific activity as the goal. Perhaps it would be more fruitful to start your design from the activity itself rather than refit the conventions of another "game-like" activity into a rough shape of the former.
You can learn more about traditional storytelling via sites like this one. I think it shouldn't be difficult to apply its methods to not so traditional topics, like pulp genre or other nerdy matters, should that be needed based on the target audience.
Next, I believe you might find reading this classic article useful. I also think it's particularly useful to notice another phenomenon existing within the hobby, one roughly equivalent to the one described, but related to games rather than stories. Specifically, the linked article gains a new meaning and mostly still makes perfect sense when all instances of the word "story" are substituted with the word "game".
I also believe homosexual people should engage in homosexual sex, while heterosexual people should engage in heterosexual sex. Not necessarily in each other's vicinity though, unless bisexual, when in turn they don't benefit from searching for a vagina on a men's body. But hey, I never said I'm not a bigot, did I?
David Berg:
Quote from: contracycle on October 24, 2011, 01:22:33 AM
it would be quite possible to constrain the whole story of "how the ring was brought to Mt Doom" and then leave the decision to throw it in or not to players or system or a mix of both.
That appears to be what Todd does. I must confess, it confuses me a bit.
I mean, if he told me up front, "you get to decide the ending," then I'd probably be looking forward to that the whole game, evaluating momentary changes in position with an eye toward the finale. That seems like a bad thing, as opposed to having things matter immediately in their own right.
And if he didn't tell me that, I'd probably be a little disoriented when it hit. Like, "wait, I get no control over the plot, but now I do get control over how it all turns out?"
But maybe I'm failing to imagine the experience accurately.
Quote from: contracycle on October 24, 2011, 01:22:33 AM
On a similar note, it is possible to do branching plans, but this is usually sub-optimal because it means that some amount of prep will not be used. As such it's quite an inefficient method for someone writing for themselves and their group, but I should mention that this problem goes away when the writer is a third party, providing material to multiple groups.
It's an interesting question. Some of the GM tastes and techniques that apply here probably apply fairly well to writing modules. That said, for now I'd like to focus on a proper interactive RPG, for which case I'd have to agree that doing prep that won't get used is generally a bad thing. I guess it depends on what sort of prep, though.
Some GMs have no trouble at all prepping and then implementing NPC stuff that may affect the players in different ways depending on what they've gotten up to. "The Vampires declare war on the CIA" is going to change your espionage game one way or the other, but it plays out differently depending on if your character is standing there for the declaration. I think that as long as the prepped event does matter to the players, how they experience it is often a good thing to leave up to chance and individual decisions.
contracycle:
Well, on the topic of a final decision, let me draw on the example of CRPG's. In the second Knights of the Old Republic game, for example, at the end the Sith Lord gives you a lecture and tries to convert you to the Dark Side. Depending on how you choose, you get a different final boss fight and different end cinematics. In Deus Ex: Invisible War you get arguments from three different factions, and deconstructions of each faction's position from the point of view of the others, and have to choose which one to throw in with. In Mass Effect 2, you have a whole bunch of subsidiary goals to complete before triggering the final act, and depending on which of those you achieved, various ally characters get killed or not.
So there are quite a lot of ways to have the overall course of play focus on a climactic moment in which some sort of choice is made. I don't think that comes across as particularly confusing. In the ring scenario, maybe you have a tracker which is modified by decisions over the course of play to determine whether you have enough control to dispose of the ring or not. One of the purposes of constraint up to that point will be to project the characters into situations where such choices may be made - the wraiths are hunting you, do you try to go invisible?, etc.
The thing is that whether a choice matters to the players and whether it matters to the GM are two different things. They only matter to the GM to the extent that they obviate future planning, and so where a choice can be made without doing so - by putting it at the end, for example - then its perfectly feasible to include that sort of thing. It isn't necessarily the case that the GM is imposing an interpretation on events. So it isn't really necessary for the idea that the GM has control over "the plot" to include in that the final decisive point of play. What they're really controlling is setting up that decisive moment, contextualising it, adding dramatic flourishes and so on.
Dan Maruschak:
Quote from: David Berg on October 23, 2011, 11:46:37 PM
My first guess is that "when" is the less important of those two in Story Before. As a matter of fact, I'd like to leave the GM free to generally dictate timing of important fictional developments.
I think pacing is an interesting question. Generally, I think of it as a pretty low-level thing, on the same sort of level as things like the amount of description. It can have an impact on the feel and tone of a story, but it isn't necessarily core to a story. I was thinking about HBO's Game of Thrones, where most of the battles are sort of skimmed over (presumably for production reasons) in contrast to the books where there's usually a bit of detail to them: the story is the same, but the way it's told is slightly different, with different pacing. But like you say, the timing of important events is in some ways what "plot" is all about. I wonder if there's an easy way to differentiate the two, or if it's more subtle, like the difference between "important fictional details" and "just color".
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Hmm. I wonder if GM and players could agree on character limits as part of character creation. Brainstorm:
1) Each character gets a Dynamic. The Dynamic is the type of character change the player is most interested in (game comes with list of genre-suitable Dynamics, GM refines further, then players pick?)
2) The GM and player discuss the bounds of each Dynamic. How high and low can the character go? Example: Courage. The GM sees problems only if the character gets utterly fearless, but finds total terror compatible with the intended plot, so the limits are set at Very Courageous and Ruled By Terror. The game system then moved the character around within that range.
Do you think there's a danger of making things over-determined? If the GM is going to be bringing a strongly pre-planned plot, I'd worry about players also trying to pre-plan or pre-explore characters. But maybe I'm just having a personal taste reaction, since I don't like to overintellectualize what I want to explore with a character before I play them because it keeps me from engaging with them emotionally.
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Does that say anything about what the resolution system should resolve?
If it's about success of character actions, then it needs to also (directly or indirectly, immediately or eventually) produce changes to the character.
But maybe it's not about success of character actions at all.
I think I might quibble with the idea that it needs to lead to change. I think it could also be about revelation. There have been a few instances in my Storied Age playtests when we were essentially asked by the game: "You failed. Why?" Having to come up with good narration that answered that question helped us develop the characters. But I suppose that some people might classify "learning something about the character that you didn't know before" as a kind of change.
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My personal sweet spot would be if I could build a character who's a machine well-suited to the game's agenda and then just play them like a real person. I think designing such a game might be more work than the alternatives, but it'd be super cool.
I think games like DITV and Apocalypse World do a good job of framing player decisions about character actions in an outward facing way that lets you think about what you want to do without worrying about knowing if what you do will succeed. Personally, I think I have an easier time "just playing my character" in a game like DITV than I do in FATE, which tells me explicitly what I'm good at (or average, fair, great, or superb at) in terms of interacting with the world. I'm thinking that the big problem is the reliable expectations you can build up: if you can know as a player that you should have a 30% chance of successfully shooting out the truck's tires then you can't mesh comfortably in a story that requires that the tires not be shot out. But what mechanics are or aren't "anti-immersive" is a highly debated topic.
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