[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents
Roger:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 29, 2011, 08:32:06 AM
Roger, I hope you can see that the structural features of My Life with Master, for instance, are very significant techniques subsets but not definitive features for a given Creative Agenda. As I see it, a lot of design over the past five years has committed the error of imposing such structure (often imitative) and missing the point.
I probably should have provided a better citation of what exactly I was talking about. Which is:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 18, 2011, 11:51:16 AM
When someone is trying to organize and carry out play that isn’t Narrativist, and he or she does impose a climactic story arc (to be experienced as the story) upon play for any number of reasons, then anyone with Narrativist leanings who’s involved is going to be either a disaster or at best be left feeling short-changed. All perceived compromises (“set it up with me beforehand”) fail.
And, aha, I see now that I missed the first part of this whole scenario: "When someone is trying to organize and carry out play that IS NOT Narrativist..."
Which helps me understand why MLWM isn't inherently a counterexample to what you're describing, at least when approached for the purposes of Narrativist play. But it does leave me wondering why that requirement exists.
So I'd like to hear more about what you would classify as "a climactic story arc within non-Narrativist play", I think. And why it's problematic for players with Narrativist leanings in ways that "climactic story arcs within Narrativist play" are not. And, perhaps, why it's problematic for players with Narrativist leanings in ways that "no story arc within non-Narrativist play" is not.
I'm especially interested in cases involving PrimeTime Adventures, which seems especially well-suited to luring unsuspecting Narrativists and equally-unsuspecting Simulationists into conflict.
On the other other hand, if you are feeling inclined to say to me: Dude, find your own goddamn examples, bring them back here or to some other thread, and we can decide then if they illustrate these principles... I would not begrudge you of that. Assuming I'm more-or-less on the righteous path so far.
Cheers,
Roger
David Berg:
Frank,
I have a possible explanation for that. For players who've felt stifled in their Narrativist leanings, pursuit of Narrativism gets conflated with pursuit of agency, and any limits on agency are unwanted reminders of "that other way I hated playing". See my chat with Zac split from this thread (starting with "Actually... here's a thought" here).
I don't see any way forward other than to acknowledge where they're coming from, verify that you're on the same page, and set proper expectations for what types of agency they will always have, never have, and sometimes have.
I'd also try emphasizing what they get out of playing with constraints, and showing how your prepped events fit into that.
If they're still not willing to try, I guess come back in a few years when they're farther from their stifling experiences?
David Berg:
Ron,
I like the notes about the right vs left superfamilies on your diagram. I have a theory that the right-hand techniques spawn more design imitation and pick-up play by being more mechanically obvious about how they produce rising action and catharsis, while the left-hand techniques are opaque on that until you include fictional situation.
If you want to talk more about this here, I'd be happy to elaborate.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Roger,
I think you are mixing up product vs. process. I want to stress that "making a story" is actually a minor concept in role-playing, despite its wide appeal and its central position in lots of discussions. By "minor," I mean that it's not hard to do once no one in the group is obstructing it. (I can talk more abou tthe obstructions if you want.) When I talk about Creative Agendas, I'm not talking about what is made, but rather, how it's done, and by "it," I mean, role-playing at all. Again, in that context, making a story is merely a fictional variable along the same lines of making enough fights or making it possible to see enough of what's on the world-map map up-close or any number of other understandable content-sets.
Story Now is a Creative Agenda not because of a desired product, but because of a desired process, and as with the other two CAs, this is a big social and creative process which may be met using a broad array of means. Therefore it is potentially facilitated by various combinations of techniques, rather than defined by any particular combination. All of which is a fancy way to say this: Story Now cannot be achievd by any techniques which guarantee the production of a story. Doing so instantly obviates the point of play.
This means that playing Story Now must incorporate (include at a fundamental level) enough thematically intense content to be acted upon through all the techniques being used. As an example from the "far" end of the design issue, you will recall that my D&D 3.0/3.5 game did not utilize explicit or previously-agreed-upon content and structural constraints to focus upon Story Now play, but it did indeed excise (ignore) textual system features which would have impeded it given our scope for play (experience points and levels). At first I was mildly concerned with getting the EPs right simply out of interest in using the rules before me, but by the end of the second session, it would be apparent to an observer that none of us cared - not even to notice that I'd stopped even handing them out, me included. But again, the more important focus is that because we shared the deeply social and creative agenda of Story Now, that's what we did with "softer" techniques like scene framing and character decisions. The classic story structure therefore came about organically, because our priorities (one priority actually) settled upon the thematically-intense components.
But what about designing games such that the system focuses upon and facilitates such play? The core design principle for games intended for Story Now play must be to provide enough content and structure to bring thematic tension into focus and to be acted upon with consequence, but not enough to guarantee that it occurs regardless of participants' commitment to it.
The variety of useful constraint turns out to include imposed structure, up to a point. Let's look at the "near" end of the design issue, which is what you're asking about, with games relying on deep and uncompromising structure. I'm arguing that strongly-structured techniques, if they are to be useful in facilitating Story Now play, must be provisional after a certain point, i.e., subordinated to actual people's decisions about how to use them at the table, and also i.e., potentially unsuccessful. Looking at my diagram, the structured techniques are most obvious on the right-hand side. Let's take two of the most influential games.
1. Universalis has absolutely no explicit mechanism for imposing thematic tension ("conflict" in literary terms) into play. If the group wants to diddle forever by adding and subtracting stuff from the fiction, with no consequence or emotional resonance, then they can. Similarly, once conflicts are in motion, there is no guarantee at all that they must come to a climax aside from group participants' interest in seeing them do so. Playing Universalis can flounder. This is, in my view, not a flaw.
2. My Life with Master has no explicit mechanic guaranteeing either (i) that a Minion will eventually attack the Master or (ii) that the Master will be killed during Endgame. In fact, regarding the latter point, Paul very deliberately left in the potential "break" lying between it and the fact that Endgame only finishes at the Master's death. In other words, a group in which not enough players are committed enough to the Master's death will simply sink into an unplayable pit of unsuccessful noise during Endgame.
(Notice how utterly dismissive the designs are toward players who "don't get it," much in the same sense that football and chess have no provisions for taking care of participants who can't fathom winning/losing as important. The second point reminds me of a key feature in The Riddle of Steel, on the other side of the diagram: Jake has explained that he deliberately wrote the game to slaughter the characters of players who focused too strongly on the nitty-gritty physical combat mechanics at the expense of the motivational, thematic, and metaphysical mechanics.)
Here's my direct response to your inquiry. Any fictional material composed of a conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution is a story. (Insightful/stupid, uplifting/depressing, short/long, simple/complicated, whatever) So I think you have it backwards: the question is not what it would look like when Story Now is not the priority, because the answer is always the same no matter what. The question is why doing it via (or within) the Story Now priority rates a Creative Agenda tag. I hope I've at least set up the answer to that here.
Jason Morningstar's titles seem to me to span a useful range for comparison. Grey Ranks is extremely facilitative of Story Now play. Fiasco is not. Both are good games, and as it happens, both tend to bring stories into existence at the table. But one does so by providing productive, one might even say traumatic story components for the people at the table to use, and the other does so by providing a story to be in.
That idea also leads to my ongoing criticism of many self-designated story games that have been produced over the last five years as wind-up toys. Which is to say, they are indeed guarantors of story production, and as such, little more than canned scripts for people to act-out parts in, much like How to Host a Murder. I do not reference that game with contempt; it does its job as advertised, which is to say, you get to be in a story, which presupposes the story be there. But the veritable ocean of story games we've seen produced in the past few years contains a lot of titles with exactly the same job, with the patently false claim that they are written in the same aesthetic and procedural vein as, for instance, My Life with Master. They simply are not. (I do not include Fiasco in this criticism, incidentally. It performs as advertised.)
I hope this makes sense. I'm making points that are not only related, but integrated, across several threads at the moment. Roger, all follow-up is welcome.
Best, Ron
Roger:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on December 01, 2011, 09:50:06 AM
Any fictional material composed of a conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution is a story. (Insightful/stupid, uplifting/depressing, short/long, simple/complicated, whatever)
Aha. This is why I've been floundering around. I've been operating under a different definition for "story".
Previously, I would have said: Here's a story -- two guys are waiting by the side for someone to show up, but he doesn't. It's the story of Waiting For Godot, beloved by millions, etc etc. Now that I know that's not the sort of story you're talking about, I should probably go back and reread everything up to this point. I'm sure it'll make a lot more sense.
My immediate reaction is to notice the obvious parallel to Gamism: any system which guarantees success or failure might be an interesting toy, but it is inherently unable to provide any meaningful Step On Up. That makes all sorts of sense.
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