[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents
Ron Edwards:
The underbelly technique
In the mid-1990s, I regularly went to a friend’s house to watch Babylon 5, during its original airing. Various members of our loose social circle had been doing some role-playing together for a while, with different games, one or another of us acting as GM.
Regarding this phase of my role-playing, after all that Champions, I finally got the grail of “the saga” out of my system, as well as really scratching my superhero itch (it’s never really returned in the same form). That means I wasn’t injecting frustration or needs from failed attempts to do those things into new play, for the first time in my life. I’d put the earliest version of Sorcerer on-line by that point, and since I was embarked on a thoroughly different design strategy, I was reading both old and new texts with new eyes. I was already working hard on systemic approaches to better results, but I had not yet learned about the Threefold discussions.
Therefore one look at The Babylon Project told me it wasn’t going to help us much in terms of system. It wasn’t my pick, but I think my friend Tom proposed it because of its official status relative to the show. This was, for me, the last serious attempt to play toward what I wanted (at this point, still un-articulated) with merely genre expectations as our shared basis for success.
We used an interesting structural technique as well, which I took to calling “underbelly.” My goals in presenting this are: (i) to discuss the thread topic of failing to find our Narrativist feet, although not tragically; (ii) to clarify that the imposed structure of the setting-changes did not itself interfere with that goal; and (iii) to open up the dialogue about how truly wide the range is for the setting-dial, in terms of both its impact on play and play’s impact on it.
I’ve described the technique before, in Meta-plots, Railroading and Settings, Open/Closed Setting(Pyron's Woe's Take 165), and Quandry: using a beloved setting that's highly restrictive. When reading these threads, if you do, please keep in mind that all of us posting often confounded setting and story. In my case, you can see me trying to claw through the fog by distinguishing between metaplot and changing-setting, which I will bring up again at the end of this post. To avoid too much necessary back-thread reading, here’s my description of the technique from the Pyron’s Woes thread:
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The underbelly tactic was inspired by one of my friends' description of an early Star Wars RPG adventure scenario, in which, at the end, the player-characters delivered a crucial recording to a little 'droid who goes "queep" and rolls off to begin the Star Wars movie. This adventure spawned a whole bunch of imitators through dozens of games which I call "Stepin Fetchit" scenarios, ie, the player-characters are couriers for the real heroes and villains, but with a little discussion, we came up with a different application.
The idea we hit was to choose a good ten episodes of Babylon Five (we left which ones up to the GM, although we all agreed on the season first). We all made up characters who were present on the scene, i.e., employed or visiting the station. So we were there in the story, and we were at the center of the action, although we made sure to make up PCs who had no direct personal tie to any of the canonical protagonists.
Tom, the GM, came up with a set of conflicts that related to the later story (with which we were all familiar). As these played out, he "ran" the canonical events simultaneously with "our" events, with all of us committed to the idea of avoiding contradictions, and equally responsible for it. Sometimes, whenever it seemed reasonable and consistent to Tom, our story caused or influenced elements of the canonical story; other times and more often, we'd hear about or see the effects of the canonical story, basically as changing setting.
The story of interest to us was that of our characters, which had conflicts and issues of its own, but as time went by, what we generated was a personal "take" or "complete version" (to put it egotistically) of the canonical story. Basically, we puffed ourselves up to being Strazcinski's collaborators, in our own minds - which if you think about it, was exactly why we were playing in that setting in the first place.
I like the "underbelly" idea. I think it preserves the respect for and interest in the canonical story, while still providing protagonism for the player-characters. The only constraint, and it must be a shared constraint, is to strive for consistency with the canonical story. Given shared commitment to this, even that becomes an interesting and fun creative task.
As you can see, this is pure techniques talk with no particular CA associated with it, merely the desire to hook into a canonical setting without being mere errand-runners. In our game, Creative Agenda was still wobbly, as most of us figured “being good at it” was the only real criterion. I was the exception, having learned such a bitter lesson from the summer 1992 Champions game that I had been almost fully convinced that role-playing was a broken medium, and at this time, five years later, only tentatively convinced that something could be done about it. I know that Ashley was deeply committed to full-on player-authority protagonism (in part from the other games she was in later, like Zero, Castle Falkenstein, and Deadlands in descending order of satisfaction). Tom was the in-play GM with his wife Camille as a prep-consultant co-GM, and I think he found himself making a serious choice about how to GM Ashley’s character. They eventually decided that low-grade telepathy (the only real option for starting characters) was worthless in the setting, and upgraded her into a P10, bypassing all point-structure mechanics to do so, so that her character arc could actually be about something. However, as I described in Can GNS modes be identified outside of GNS conflict?, specifically page 3, it never gelled for us as a group. In fact, I think I’ll quote myself from that thread:
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Our game of the Babylon Project in 1995 [this must be wrong because the game was released in 1997 – RE]; it might be considered my lesson in how badly a couple years of Magic had marred my role-playing skills, but also how well a couple of years of Magic had taught me that role-playing rules were largely bogus, and become more so by the month.
I was playing the Centauri pirate, Zev Cesare. For the first few sessions, it's fair to say that no Force was exerted on me or my fellow players. Result? A hell of a lot of good reinforcement of the primary source material (obviously, the show, second season; we were playing "underbelly" on the Babylon Station, given our knowledge of later season or so). That reinforcement took the shape of very fun character depiction (accents, etc), some runnin' around trying to find stuff on the station, and a few brawls based on inter-race prejudice, simple politics, or misunderstandings.
In other words, not much of any story resulted except for tracking the story we already knew existed (the show's) and using that as a group-celebrated constraint. Did we "do" Babylon Five to our satisfaction during this phase? Sure. But we were also itchy that no story of our own was occurring - at least, the GM and his co-GM/assistant were.
Now, the second half of our game (about six or seven more sessions) were characterized by a mix of aggressive scene framing (not itself Force, usually) and basic Force, usually toward a couple of other players who were looking for cues of the sort I describe above. Not outright "you do this" statements on the part of the GM, but "opportunities" which were essentially "do this" offers that were not intended to be refused. As the players were tacitly complicit in taking such offers, we were off to the races and "a story" occurred - helmed throughout, of course, by the GM.
This is a good example because we can compare the no-Force and Force phases of play, and also because I did have a hell of a lot of fun, most of the time. Most of my fun came from a strong Explorative focus - because I was expressing my fandom for the show via a character whose like was not seen on but was fully consistent with the show. For those of you familiar with it, I'm sure you can see that a flamboyant Centauri pirate is a way fun notion.
(more)
Ron Edwards:
And when asked for further detail:
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Due to popular request, a typical early session in the Babylon Project game ...
The characters included my pirate, a young telepath (the most thankless character choice in the system), and one other I can't recall well, but was probably a trader/gambler of some kind. [I remember now, he was - RE] The setting is a space station which fulfills a dipolomatic role among all these different spacegoing races/cultures. However, for us, the show itself was also setting, in the underbelly sense. The GM had chosen a sequence of episodes we were all familiar with, and the events of our game were to occur on the station during those episodes. Our shared constraint was not to futz with the canonical events, and our overall goal was to have a kind of "second show" that a B5 fan would appreciate greatly. We didn't know which episodes they were exactly, starting out, although we knew the season, and as expected and appreciated by all of us, we sussed out which episodes we were in pretty quickly.
Now for the session. There were three things going on in the show during these episodes, one of which was only known to people who were watching the current episodes. A war was brewing between two of the races, a prophecy of some kind was coming to fruition, and very nasty uber-alien, Lovecraftian beings were manipulating things behind the scenes (that would only become clear to viewers during the third season). [editing this in: that description isn't quite right; when composing the original post, I didn't remember the exact sequence. I’ll clarify the precise show components and how they related to the episodes/seasons timing if anyone’s interested. – RE]
Well. The episode I recall best from this period concerned things for all of our characters: the telepath was being chased around the station (unregistered TPs were illegal), and the other two were enmeshed in a big fight in a bar area, during which some gangsters tried to kill my character under cover of the brawl. We got to shoot up a bunch of gangsters. At one point, the telepath glimpsed a terrifying and horrible Lovecraftian alien being deep in the bowels of the station, and it spoke to her in some sort of mind-shattering way. The setting closed with the pirate and the trader/gambler character getting individually interrogated lightly by the security chief of the station (an important character on the show).
The system has a few interesting features; the one I liked the most was the resolution of arms fire, with "misses" possibly still hurting the person, just not where you aimed. Fights were fun in this game. On the other hand, the basic resolution system was a 2d6 TN system dressed up in unnecessary handling-time manipulations to seem like it was "new" (a common thing at this point).
The experience of play had exactly the features you describe, Elliott: not much direction or "do this" from the GM, but also not much in the way of characters actually driving at things they wanted or cared about. We all steered our characters around and had them say things. It was, in fact, action-packed, and we all got to deliver combat or escape tactics, as well as interact with some colorful individuals. But a lot of our actions were "feelers," just doing stuff to see what beeped or hit "the story," such as when my character called his aunt because I simply couldn't imagine anything else for him to do that would discover anything. The beep turned out to be a buzz when this accidentally precipitated a political incident. So our actual activity as people, players, was very much in the realm of "do stuff, find out if it's a beep or a buzz."
Touchstones for the show included tension between the two brawling alien races, a brief glimpse of the terrifying alien, and the security chief. We all took these aspects seriously, such that the fact that we brought them off with no violation of our primary, show-based enjoyment of them was sufficient reward for play.
And yes, the key issue from a larger perspective is that this payoff is insufficient, for me. It palls; two episodes of recognizing that this "don't violate the show, do colorful stuff" process is possible is plenty. The GM felt the same way and went into a more Force-heavy approach (the only approach that to him would yield "story"), and the whole thing took on the sameness of many such games. Yes, things "held together" and our characters "came together and teamed up," and the story ended with the telepath becoming immensely strong and going off to become something important, elsewhere. However, the story only became a story insofar as A led to B; it was a tapestry, but not much else. I can't even recall what we teamed up against.
If we had, on the other hand, gone into a mode in which all of us were issues-oriented, and focused on developing other angles onto the thematic content of the show which mattered to us (and in fact, the show was extremely strong by the 4th season), then I think we would have been astonished. Such a mode might be muted and slow and subtle, or it might have been a slam-bang conflict-conflict approach - doesn't matter. But no such modality occurred.
I think this fits well with the thread topic of not-quite-understood, desired but not entirely realized Story Now play, in the sub-category of no real Agenda clash arising, but not really successful application of that agenda either. This particular group of people and I went on to try to use more systemic means toward what we wanted, playing Hong Kong Action Theater, Zero, Castle Falkenstein, a focused/Drifted application of Marvel Super Heroes, and more. The “discontents” in this case were more like negative results for probes in an ongoing investigation, helping us sort out what we found did and didn’t work, rather than being crashing failures.
The big take-away for the thread topic, I think, is that we did hit upon a genuinely successful means of opening things up for creating a story, but then encountered uneasy tension about what to impose Before which did not interfere with Story Now. Therefore this play-account reinforces my point about the chapter technique.
It also brings up a much more difficult topic. I want to stress that imposed setting does not, in and of itself, impair Narrativist play. Yes, we used a canonical setting, and in fact, our particular fan-fave, geeked-out setting at that time; and yes, we imposed a linear structure upon play which was entirely relevant, indeed an integrated scaffolding, for the plot. Neither of these caused us a bit of trouble regarding Narrativist goals. Our problem was that we didn’t manage to rise above mere satisfaction, which led to productive dialogue among all of us about why not.
It also brings up the very thorny issue of not only setting, but a changing setting. To talk about this, we have to be rigorous with definitions.
Setting should not be a catch-all term for anything that’s external to the characters. It should be restricted to the notion of everything known about everything external to the characters.
So that means two things: (i) characters are inside a Setting, hence encountering only a subset of it; and (ii)Situation is an emergent property of where, when, and how characters are encountering that subset, including who they are as well.
The hard part about thinking about it this way is that Setting beyond Situation is not necessarily emphasized or even considered in many perfectly functional ways to play. You don’t need to consider Setting beyondthe Situation level, but here, in this thread and in my recent essay, we’re talking about when we want to.
With all that settled (I hope), now we can address the fact Situations do change via play – in fact, they have to, or arguably, play hasn’t even occurred regardless of how many dice were rolled or how much in-character posturing occurred. Think in terms of Heraclitus: “No man can step into the same river twice; in the first place, it’s not the same river, and in the second, he’s not the same man.” A given system might emphasize either change in the river more or the change in the man more, but you gotta have either or both.
Whew, and now we can impose upon all this the much larger-scale variable of Setting changing too. How is this done? What are the implications of doing it?
Well, one thing’s for sure: changes in Setting are a very significant algebraic modifier of any imaginable
Situation within it, going forward. Which makes play which directly reaches “up” to affect/change setting a very, very important option to consider. And indeed, which way you flip on this, i.e., doing it or not doing it, also implies entirely different meanings or even purposes for starting with an especially detailed setting
As I mentioned in the essay, historically, dedicated Narrativist play has generally been character-centric, and hence, play is intended to break the characters. It is reasonable to say in parallel that setting-centric Narrativist play is intended to break the setting. Since these two categories do overlap, the degree and means and meaning of breaking one or the other are all untapped discussion topics. I am convinced this is a deep, rich vein to be mined over multiple threads and from multiple perspectives.
For example, in the B5 game, causality only ran one way: the canonical shifts in setting, such as the initiation of a war, imposed changes on our characters’ situation. We didn’t think in terms of our characters’ situations’ outcomes affecting new situations directly, still less whether those outcomes would “hop up” to affect things at the setting level. I’m not saying that’s bad or good, merely that it represents one way to organize these concepts out of many possible ways.
Also for example, Trollbabe is designed to set a very hard limit between Situation (can be affected by the player-characters) and Setting (cannot), and moving that limit upwards in scale through multiple adventures. I’m not saying that’s the only way to parse these things, and especially not that the can/cannot dichotomy in this game is supposed to be definitional. It is, however, one of the few games which tries to give the distinction a functional mechanical utility in play.
Jamie, your current thread hopped into this depth before I was able to get this post up, so that’s why I’ve delayed answering in your thead; I needed this one to reference. To minimize confusion, let’s talk about all issues relevant to the Babylon Project game here, and all issues relevant to your Glorantha games in your thread. If those issues overlap, no big deal; we’ll be redundant and probably benefit from it.
It also happens that I'm re-watching Babylon 5 at this very time, seeing it again for the first time since it aired in the mid-1990s, and I'm all geeked about it. So any questions about this game we played, or about any aspects of that show as it might relate to role-playing, are especially welcome.
Best, Ron
edited to fix typo - RE
David Berg:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 15, 2011, 11:18:48 AM
It also happens that I'm re-watching Babylon 5 at this very time, seeing it again for the first time since it aired in the mid-1990s, and I'm all geeked about it. So any questions about this game we played, or about any aspects of that show as it might relate to role-playing, are especially welcome.
You know the library in the Dreaming from Sandman, filled with all the books authors dreamed up but never wrote? The DVDs of B5 seasons 4 & 5 as intended better be in there. Straczynski wanted to do season 4 about the Shadows/Vorlons and season 5 about re-taking Earth, but the network wouldn't guarantee a 5th season, so he crammed the whole thing into season 4. I love season 4's plot, but I loathe the pacing, especially of the Shadow/Vorlon conclusion. 10 years later this tragedy still gnaws at me.
I do have questions about B5esque roleplaying, but you may have already answered them, so I intend to read through the whole thread first.
Ron Edwards:
Wincing slightly ...
... Everyone, I know I said geeking out is cool, but let's stay with what I asked, talking about the show as it relates to role-playing, please. I'm realizing that B5 discussions are a fandom quagmire, especially of the sort that invites empty quips, links to the music albums Bill Mumy organized later, and debates about Claudia Christian pro or con. This thread and its related ones begun by others are among the most serious work ever embarked upon at the Forge. Can we focus please?
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
While reading the first page of this thread, something struck me about the She-Dragon/Metalstorm situation. My take has everything to do with Story Before, and nothing inherently to do with Narrativism. Is that on-topic here, or should I take that elsewhere?
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