[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents
James_Nostack:
Comics fan question: did it turn out that PSI's secret backer was Doctor Chaos, and PSI had persuaded the world that the other 118.8 super humans no longer existed? Also: lotta Byrne on that list of inspirations. The structure of those early Alpha Flight stories is interesting (maybe a big get-together every year or so, with a few heroes off on their own the other 11 months of the year, with back-up stories) and one I wish other team comics had explored. Playing a super-hero team troupe style has never been done in supers games (so far as I know, which isn't much).
Substance point: I had a very similar experience to this in an Alternity game I played back in 2002-2005. It ended up being more functional in part because I was able to transition play to a much more open-ended thing midway through the campaign, so that we had a large amount of (Story Before) play that we were all passionate about, and then I gave the reins to the players to handle any way they chose. Which was a hell of a lot more fun than prepping the hell out of everything.
Callan S.:
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That brings up a lesson I learned about back-story and Premise, which is that they only go so far – endings do matter. In violating this lesson, endless serial fiction has inherent limits that have to be accepted to be fun, and in some cases, doing so is less fun. I’m not one of these people who says “Man, they should have had another season.” I think Holmes should have died in his fight with Moriarty.
It's not as epic, but this reminds me of my groupd 3.5 campaign. After getting to about level 10 on average and having aquired as a group a little keep on our own patch of borderland (as well as some gold and weaponry (well below the books average, though), as a group...we had kind of reached our wildest dreams right there. It was a 'Whoever wants to, GM's' kind of game and I remember my friend Daniel saying "Well, castles need upkeep and you need to adventure for upkeep" and I got this unpleasant feeling. It was like an instant, fairly realistic hamster wheel, so that we were always one inch from forfilling the own your own castle dream. And it felt uhh, because that could be spun out like an american soap - forever. He also asked me to co GM a campaign with those characters, which I took up and we worked on a bit with a guy called Blood Weaver, who was genetically reseting people into beastial forms in an effort to start from whole cloth and get everything right this time. Clearly with an impetus, if unspoken, if him eventually being beaten (pre decided result). But although we ran some game with that stuff in it (with me as a player, even), it never really took off. We had our castle, almost and...okay, some wierd monsters are around. Yeah, it was a primarily gamist game, but I suspect there actually has to be a sort of character motivation spine to it, and we had completed that spine (barring the hamster wheel).
Ron Edwards:
Hi everyone,
I greatly appreciate the feedback. This thread is proving quite harrowing to compose, and ordinarily, I’d merely enjoy the intellectual responses, but it turns out I’m sort of needing them emotionally, for once.
Zac, I know what you’re talking about. I did this to some extent with my character Nocturne in the Northwatch game, although I think the others generally enjoyed it as audience. He was a fun character and I played him with verve, and Ran was able to indulge his wilder side in ways that the other characters (very white-bread) provided no opportunities for. I was a horrible talking-hog though, in that game, and Ran had to shut me up a lot. And the corollary problem, too, was that since “my” movie was the only really thematically adverse one, I tended to be uninterested in the other characters, tuning out during play, and looking forward more to Ran and I hanging out for a while after play.
Also, your observation reminds me of a conversation from GenCon a few years ago. I was approached by two guys seeking a podcast interview, one of whom was so bent out of shape by “me” that he was belligerent. Among other things, he insisted that playing more than one Creative Agenda at the table was totally possible. I swear, this is what he said: "You can too do it! I did it! ... Uh, well, I had to run five separate games simultaneously, but I did it!" One of those moments when you spread your hands and say, “Thanks for winning my argument.”
Hey James,
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Comics fan question: did it turn out that PSI's secret backer was Doctor Chaos, and PSI had persuaded the world that the other 118.8 super humans no longer existed?
Nope. PSI was merely ancillary to the real story going on, a particularly severe example of how superpowers were deeply embedded in political history and personal aggrandizement. They were already merely the leftovers of the original PSI, and once they were taken down in that chapter, they were gone.
There was a Humongous Interstellar Entity called the Devourer who was going to eat all life on Earth, and the retired Doctor Chaos diverted its attention to the world’s super-powered people, hoping they’d actually be able to stop it. They weren’t; it ate them; but that fulfilled his Plan B because it turned out to be enough power to sate it; now Raptor was bringing it back.
Doctor Chaos (retired) was a standup guy, and frankly, I never thought of him as a villain, more of an at-least-arguable Third Way fuck-you to the superpowers. I should explain that the latter decade of his career in the handout (post 1956 or so) was actually another guy in his outfit, the Winsington guy. The real Doctor Chaos, who’d retired to contemplate things, was named Hamilton. He was both Raptor’s and Serpentine’s father.
Also, part of the point was that as the world's former premier supervillain, and having sired arguably the single most evil (or at least the most insanely amoral) supervillain of all, Raptor, he was now seeking to mentor real heroes. If not the world's first in terms of individuals, definitely the world's first ideals-based, uncompromised hero team.
Out of order, regarding the troupe-style idea: the closest to that in my reading list was Suicide Squad written by Ostrander and Yale, especially after the two-year mark. A certain amount of the stuff “on their own” turned out to be aspects of missions, but not all of it, especially when the Bronze Tiger and Vixen moonlighted to do stuff with the PLO (unnamed in the book) and took sides in certain African disputes, all of which became relevant later in the story. An obvious example was the four-issue limited series with Deadshot, in which the phrase “all about my mother” took on particularly horrible meaning.
You’re right to spot the Byrne influence, but I must stress that I was openly seeking to redeem Byrne, taking the stuff I really liked (which I thought of as heir to both Lee and Thomas) and excising the ridiculous contempt for the material he seemed unable to quell in anything he worked on except for that glorious run in the Fantastic Four.
I wish I’d been able to let go of the reins as much as you did with the Alternity game. Or perhaps it would have been best for us to call it at episode #20, saying, now that was a fuckin’ good story, and leaving it alone.
Callan, I totally agree that character motivation often has to be at least present, even if not the single most driving force, in a lot of people’s primarily Gamist play. (Per Gareth’s point in a current thread, this is a choice; lacking it doesn’t make people bad or conditioned or pathological in any way.) It looks as if the “OK we did it!” feeling should have been honored by closure, much as “OK, we did it, we’re a real team with a real purpose!” could well have been so honored in the Force Five game.
Also, your description seems tied to an observation of mine that a lot of D&D seems to hit a sweet spot from levels 4 through 8, with 10 being a potential moment of sprawling breakdown.
Best, Ron
Web_Weaver:
Hi Ron,
With you all the way on this, lots of resonances with my play experience, which is mainly Glorantha based so you can imagine I'm sure.
But apart from pointing out I'm an interested reader, I wanted to pull on a loose thread that is nagging at me.
Your use of Story Before / Story After as terms seems a bit problematic. They work as terms that help define Story Now in the negative, but whenever you or others even passingly apply them to other CAs they just seem to loose their meaning. So the question is really, do you think these terms even have any meaning outside of the context of Story Now play?
Web_Weaver:
Taking it to a new thread, too much to say.
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