[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents
Ron Edwards:
This is a spinoff thread from decoupling Reward Systems from broad-scale Story Arcs, to address an issue I think lurks alongside the topic of that thread. To summarize, we're talking about play in which (i) a story, in the most ordinary sense of the term, is largely pre-conceived and sequentially imposed (although I'd prefer a less loaded term) into play, and (ii) this is being done with a sense of collusion and needed participation on the parts of everyone else. I wrote a little essay recently about something else which tapped into this issue enough to be useful for it, called Setting and emergent story, helping to lock down the terminology into Story Before, Participationist play.
I mentioned an idea briefly in the parent thread and then decided, in parallel with the thread author, that it would do better in its own thread. The idea is that discussing how to do Story Before, Participationist play well, is quite likely subject to taint and distraction when a certain body of players is taken into account, those who would much prefer but do not know much about playing Story Now. I think I know a lot about this because I was one of them and to an extent still am (as the actual point of my above-linked essay demonstrates).
This potential problem occurred to me as I was combing old threads that might be relevant to the parent thread. A lot of them were, but I found that again and again, the topic of the old thread was all about getting Story Now play into action, or more specifically, how to do so in contrast to a single, historically-prevalent way to play Story Before. So in most cases, especially the ones from 2001-2002, the discussion of techniques was remarkably clear and inspiring, but simultaneously confounded with Story Now/Before issues.
What I'm saying - and as confirmed to me again and again as I meet role-players today, so this is not some momentary thing that's over - is that people who want to break away from the familiar, historically-prevalent way to play Story Before must face a very hard, non-intuitive question: whether they want Story Now instead of Story Before, or whether they want a more satisfying way to do Story Before. David says he knows which he wants, and that's great. The parent thread has done a good job of outlining the tasks involved in the latter. But I think ignoring that question in terms of audience may create a cruel trap for some of them, so I want to dedicate this thread to examining the question in detail.
A genuine concern
I played in a multiple-session game of Obsidian during 2000 and 2001, with Dav Harnish as GM.
Let me tell you about Dav. He was the primary content author, co-designer of the system, and one of the publishers for the game. Its setting is quite hardcore mix of apocalyptic future, occult nastiness, and punkish brutality. Its resemblance to “goth” or “White Wolf clone” is misleading; the game is much more authentic. The group included me, his girlfriend at the time (another member of the publishing team), and another fellow named Mario who’s shown up in my actual play posting; we enjoyed playing together a lot and stayed together as a group for quite a while.
He and the other Obsidian authors differed regarding their ideals of play, and as the main content author, he’d managed to keep the book from going the full GM-in-charge route despite some legacy text. As a player, with one of the other authors as GM, he had reached the point of such combined annoyance and weariness with the Shadowrun-adventure model of play, that he often had his character simply pull out a gun and shoot NPCs who tried to brief “the team” on the next mission. “He was obviously going to betray us,” he’d say.
So in our game, he employed intuitive continuity (a term coined by Gareth-Michael Skarka in one of his early games), effectively using player-character actions and players’ statements of interest to shape his preparation for each session. The technique relies as well on aiming toward a synthesis which then turns into more traditional set-up prep, especially for revelations and set-piece combats. The point is that you don’t do that stuff, including even creating the back-story, until you’ve gathered enough material from player-character activity to do so. The net effect is that the characters are automatically hooked into the plotline and the players’ attention has not been tweaked or yanked toward anything they weren’t already interested in doing.
It would have worked wonderfully toward the end of a nice set-piece fight with a bad guy, if it were not for one thing: me. My character, Ysidra Xo, a cross between a homeless person and a militant saint, exerted immense “grab” on all of us, me included, since I deliberately ignored any and all urges to “make a story” out of her, playing in full advocacy and nearly all Actor Stance at all times. What happened was that I provided an example of someone who would be a human being at all costs, which in the Obsidian setting meant a lot of room to pay those costs, and a lot of opportunities to punish those who’d cheated in that same game.
Mario was playing a relatively “safe” concept, a cyber-merc-bodyguard character – but a few sessions in, found himself playing someone who had chosen how to die well, and who sought to make “well” into the best it could be, with his cyber-equipment being a means to that end. Elizabeth was playing her boilerplate character she always played, a Kultist who’d gone rogue, and for once, she found herself actually trying to make a new life for the character.
I’ll brag because Ysidra led the way, but the fact is, the room was full of frustrated Narrativists, three of whom had never encountered unequivocal and non-negotiated group buy-in toward thematic tension and inevitable payoff. Dav was astonished in particular because we absolutely despised any hint of him taking it easy on us, and demanded confrontation with stuff he’d merely hinted about in order to be spooky. So he had to abandon intuitive continuity and start thinking in terms of more dedicated prep. The moments of play were great because they were all emergent and horribly personal. For example, in their home/other game, Dav was playing a really nasty torturer and mutilator, but it meant nothing, just yawns or gross-outs. But in ours, when Ysidra made a fist and pumped her arm such that the bicycle chain went clank, clank, clank as it wrapped around her forearm, we’d all wince – in our game, a punch from her hurt even to imagine, because we knew whom it was hitting, and why.
We’d planned on playing a few-session minor story, but it went on weekly for almost six months. It was a good example of the setting-centric approach, too, and I found myself committed to becoming a student of Obsidian’s setting. I certainly would otherwise never have read the setting material in the core book or the later supplements (Zone, Wasteland, Demons) to any extent.
I describe all of this to show that it’s crucial to find out what someone who’s tired of Story Before actually wants. In this case, it was rare-meat Story Now.
But what if it’s not? The problem I’m raising is that someone like me would have been a poisonous, impossible presence in that group if my goals of play were restricted to myself, especially if the other people wanted functional Participationist play of any kind, and most especially if they wanted Story Before Participationist play. In those circumstances, the presence of some nascent Narrativist is about to unleash a whole swollen sac of skunk-stink into the group, and the fact that it would be inadvertent would not mitigate the problem one bit.
I know this from much painful experience. I found a brief older thread about it, When the Narrativist is dysfunctional. (The thread’s age does show; note that at least one person confuses Director Stance with Narrativism.)
At the risk of stating the obvious, one of the worst features of such a situation is that the opposed parties are both passionately invoking the term “story” in an idealistic and defensive fashion. I’ll elaborate on this problem in my next post.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Don’t try to make me think, you Nazi
Whether we’re seeing clash at the table, as I mentioned above, or talking about what various techniques are for or do, another problem comes up. This next post applies to the whole sandbox problem as well, so it has some implications for the parent thread. Its purpose in this thread concerns the fact that even talking about “what we are doing here” goes badly south when incipient Narrativism is either present or even mentioned.
If you don’t know what you want (Story Before or Story After or neither), or don’t want to examine it due to baggage and loaded terms, you become emotional, defensive, and prone to projection. In short, I can’t talk to someone struggling in the grip of cognitive dissonance.
To call someone out on this directly: see my dialogue with Louis in "Sand Box" Adventures. I realized that the conversation would go nowhere unless he would come absolutely clean with me whether his particular play-goals included incipient Narrativism or not. If so, then we could talk a lot more about what “sandbox” meant with such things in mind, and if not, then we could talk about it meant without them.
And yes, he did call me a Narrativist Nazi. Most importantly, he did so without knowing anything about what I meant by the term Narrativism. So phase one of the conversation was all based on him thinking I meant “Story Before,” which is the one thing I do know is loathed by anyone using the term “sandbox.” And then when reading my essay, he mis-read it entirely to mean in-place Story Before (i.e. detached authorship) and became angry enough with that to curtail the conversation. Which meant completely missing my other fork in the road, to discuss what might be going on if emergent Narrativism were not the goal.
The thing is, it’s entirely unclear whether he was mad because:
i) incipient Narrativism was the goal but it went against his subcultural grain to admit it. This is a big deal for some of the OSR participants, who feel that all goals of play are supposed to be utterly organic and unspoken, mediated only by talk of “playing right,” which in turn is then polluted by a certain fundamentalist orthodoxy in the latter.
or,
ii) incipient Narrativism was emphatically not what he wanted; in which case, I can’t say more because we never got to that point.
Furthermore, based on this and many similar conversations, I am convinced that people in this situation do not themselves know why they are angry.
One reason might lie in associative rather than definition-based terminology. The terms are loaded beyond belief and embedded in veritable strata of subculture and group-specific meanings. To some, saying “story” in role-playing means being railroaded, and even if they make wonderful stories of their own using what to me are classic Narrativist-facilitating procedures, then they are going to swear up and down and sideways that they don’t, or if they did, they never, ever intended to. Others have honed Participationist techniques to perfection and in their case, one of those techniques is never, ever to admit that they follow cues when “deciding” where their characters will next go on the map.
Another might lie in subcultural positioning and identity politics. The logic in that case is based on the idea that a particular game title is supposed to carry hobby-wide bragging rights for the good, best, most pure, and highest geek-status role-playing. The extent to which the authors and consumers of railroady White Wolf adventures and designers of games that blatantly imitate White Wolf buy into this is quite clear. The extent to which some OSR participants resent the “wrongful” dethroning of pre-2nd edition D&D (with or without the “A”) from this status is a matter for some concern
(It is worth noting that representatives of both groups despite their dislike of one another are united in inaccurately accusing me of such views regarding the Sorcerer text. I particularly like the claims that it openly and specifically defames White Wolf or D&D. There is no such mention. Inventing evidence is a giveaway sign of identity-based defensiveness.)
The question is whether the people discussing what sandbox is (and I hope, what it isn’t, some day, please) right now are going to descend into a such a morass as soon as one of them displays incipient Narrativism without knowing it, and no one can tell why everyone is suddenly getting angry.
More posts to come, about playing Champions 'way back in the day, and also The Babylon Project.
Best, Ron
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Ron,
This is pretty much the reason I created The Same Page Tool - I was looking for a way to talk to new people about what kind of game they're trying to play (and, of course, that alternatives exist, even if they were not aware of them initially).
I figured by grabbing a bunch of recognizable techniques and putting them in a value neutral menu, people could at least start getting together without the issues of "THEORYOMGWTFBBQ" reactions.
Aside from the usual "real gamers don't talk about the magic they make" thinking, I think a lot of the other anger comes out of a lot of these people having had bitter battles with past groups about what they were trying to do. I'm finding a lot of the sudden rage outs is because some idea happens to poke a spot that's an unattended wound from past group conflicts - usually also buried down with "We don't talk about it".
Chris
edited to fix link - RE
Abkajud:
[hopefully this is on topic. If not, I'll just go put it up on my blog :)]
Ron,
I've been the dysfunctional Narrativist in the room, and honestly it did boil down to me having a narrow vision of what was an acceptable form of play.
To whit (I may have shared this with you individually before, but anyway):
- Allison, a college friend, was going to run 4e D&D in the Eberron setting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberron).
- I was still learning what I did and didn't like about Step On Up play, but I figured I'd give it a whirl.
- When the group made characters, I had a pretty strong concept in mind: a druid-ish priest of hearth and home who believed the Doom of Khorvaire was caused (spiritually, that is) by the people of that nation forgetting what was really important in life - obligations to family, community, and nature, and this Doom and the subsequent wars were their just punishment. My "guy" was going to find a way into Khorvaire, gather up any refugees he could find, and lead them to safety on the condition that they convert to his religion.
- The first scene I was in had me being told my "mission" by a prince: he would supply and reward me and my companions in exchange for us going into Khorvaire on a fact-finding mission. I told him I needed tents and food and water for refugees we were going to rescue, and he wasn't interested.
So we argued.
Pretty quickly, Allison seemed like she was actually getting upset with me for not going along with the "plot". What frustrated me was that I was; I just wanted to make some demands of this wealthy benefactor before going out on my quest. Sadly, negotiations (albeit of a more confrontational bent) constituted "getting away from the plot". She had assumed I would "understand" (that is, read the social cues) that I was just being given a mission brief and this was not the time to talk or really do much of anything other than listen.
- Later, with the party walking around the city after my briefing, the Warforged PC (a steampunk golem kinda dude, if anyone's unfamiliar) starts getting hassled by some locals who don't take kindly to their... kind. I stood up for our buddy, but an NPC accompanying us (as a guide, I guess?) told me to just let it go, that these things happen. When I went for a weapon, Allison interjected a Meaningful Look, and I got the message - - "Don't go exploring shit; this is my plot and you are ruining it right now."
- That was my first and last session with the group.
I think what I'm trying to say is that if I know where my interests lie, it's up to me to assess whether anyone else shares them in the group, and if they don't, I need to switch gears or gtfo. If I push for Narrativist play, and no one else wants that/knows what it is/kill it with fire!, then there's gonna be trouble. It's really interesting how every style of play, no matter how GM-heavy or GM-directed it is, requires some combination of active participation and passive non-interference in order to function.
Callan S.:
It's only a hypothesis, but I imagine for story before players, they have already made their address of premise during prep. Then it's a matter of playing it out. The story now player gets identified as a story before player (people with hammers just see other people as having hammers). This apparently story before player then starts disrupting the playing out of the prepped address of premise. Which makes them a story before equivalent of a prima donna or player typhoid mary (the story now player effectively uses 'force' on the playing out of others prepped address of premise, since it wont let it play out). And so they get as angry as the rage felt when the names 'prima donna' and 'typhoid mary' were invented and defined.
How you'd test or more importantly, disprove that theory, I'm not sure of a method right now.
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