[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents

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Abkajud:
Callan,
... okay. I think I get it. So, the misconception is that, because no one else has even heard of Story Now, they assume that you want Participationist play like the rest of the group, but you want the pre-determined plot to revolve around you and only you. Yes?
That is exactly what happened with me in the AP I mentioned; I could tell from the looks I was getting that this was the impression people got of me.

Ron Edwards:
Not surprisingly, early thoughts on how to get theme-emergent play focused on nailing down story structure. My and others’ thinking was, if you get the rising action and climactic stuff scheduled, even without necessarily pre-setting its content, then you can stop worrying about whether it will happen.

The tricky thing is that whole “it will occur vs. what is its content” distinction. I wrestled with this issue perhaps as hard and as long as anyone possibly could have for a solid decade. For reference, I began role-playing in 1978, with plenty of D&D of various textual combinations, also with a strong dose of The Fantasy Trip. Later games (not an inclusive list) included RuneQuest and Stormbringer.

My purpose here is to show that imposing structure does not itself resolve the Story Before vs. Story Now question of play, leaving the door open for all the problems I tried to discuss in my above two posts. I also want to show that I, when groping around in unstated but heartfelt commitment to Story Now, could not see how to (or that I should) avoid Story Before. My current thought is

The chapter technique
From 1985 through 1992, I played Champions almost continuously, at times playing in several games/groups simultaneously. For reference, until 1990, I used the 3rd edition (1985), including supplementary materials from earlier editions. After that, I used the 4th edition, although refusing to employ a number of its rules changes and relying mainly on the philosophy of play implied and sometimes explicit in the earlier editions’ materials.

Let’s see … 1985-1986, that was the Champions game (meaning, our fictional supergroup’s name was the same as the game’s title) that I GM’ed; then 1986-1989, that was the Shield game (no relation whatsoever to the organization in Marvel Comics, merely the same name) I GM’ed for almost the same people; then there was the Northwatch game I played a character in, in 1987-1989, with a different group entirely. Then I moved from Chicago to Gainesville, Florida, eventually organized a new group beginning with a Cyberpunk game, and GM’ed the Force Five game from 1990 through 1992, as well as a few shorter games, both GMing and playing in, during visits to Chicago.

Portrait of a gamer: I played a bunch of other games during this period too, some briefly, some for quite extended periods: Rolemaster in several settings, GURPS in several settings, Heroes Unlimited, Cyberpunk (original), a few home-brews of my own mostly about psychedelic fantasy adventure, Warhammer, Fighting Fantasy, The Fantasy Trip … probably more I’ll remember later. I should also mention my extreme involvement with The Clobberin’ Times APA, although only in its paper phase (see its History section. Fortunately I was able to dig out my copies last night and find some very detailed material about the game, which means I don’t have to dig even further into the old notebooks, all of which I do have somewhere …

I’ll focus my attention on the method I worked out for the Shield game and then applied very, very strictly in the Force Five game.

My first, eponymous Champions game had been a social and creative sprawl, probably more like an actual Marvel title from the mid-60s through the mid-70s in doing “whatever” as we went along. The second game, Shield, was much more focused and got a few things out of my system: the epic time-travel circle (God, how tedious), learning the conceptual limits of mind control, and genre expectations. Also, along with the Northwatch game, it really taught me the game’s precise social and creative breakpoints.

Therefore, in setting up to play the Force Five game (note – the name was created by the players during character creation, not imposed by me), I presented and expected very strictly composed, articulated, agreed upon, and applied look & feel, comics sources, values standards, rules applications, and mechanical point structure. In my current terminology, I’d call it deep Color commitment + precise System manifestation.

First, I began with a handout, a couple of pages summarizing the general superhero setting and some twentieth-century history. So you know, I disliked “alternative history” settings for superheroes, preferring the approach more widely used when I was young, of having the superheroic events be effectively in our world, both as it happened and as it’s happening now, case closed, all inconsistencies ignored. I was also pretty tired of superhero settings with super-characters numbering in the hundreds of thousands. So, it looked like this. I just noticed that I did not include some crucial information in the handout, but it had been articulated clearly to each player – that super-characters had never been common, but in 1980, at the most common (about 120 world-wide), 99% of them disappeared.

I am not sure how many people reading this will understand, but regarding the setting, the point is to prepare very, very little beyond what’s on the page. This handout also included a brief but very pointed summary of the comics I was most inspired by for this game, what features of them I wanted to draw upon, and why; as well as a specification of my desired application of the rather sprawling Champions rules. This latter was particularly emphasized in my initial verbal invitation to play and at our first get-together.

Then came massive character creation with a lot of aesthetic commitment, cluing the players into most of the general prep aside from a secret or two. Properly constructed (per CA), Champions characters are honed combinations of flash, bang, and soap opera, in varying proportions which lend themselves well to individual players’ desires. My goal at the time was to tie as much of all three into my own super-historical back-story ideas as possible, thus enriching the latter considerably and providing as much immediate relevance per character as possible.

(Huh! I hadn’t broken superheroes into that little set of casual variables before. Very helpful.)

Content was particularly good for the Force Five game, and I had a strong idea of how much to provide, how much to make up later, and how much to let arise from the characters.

The players did a pretty good job! Force Five (mis-identified at the CT site as the Shield), clockwise from top left: Serpentine, Strobe, Blackfell, She-Dragon, Irie. Blackfell was a replacement for Cortex, a character who had to be retired for a while when a player moved away and another guy joined the group. I’ll see about scanning some of the other art we accumulated as well; some of it is quite good.

Strobe: flash that won’t quit, enough bang for fun, and hardly any soap opera (player was Lawrence Collins)
She-Dragon: maxed out on all three (player was Mike Kent)
Irie: very hip flash (Jamaican = coolest on Earth, at the time), plenty of bang, enough soap opera to work with (player was Pat Beatty)
Cortex: scary bang, not much flash (had to force it), not enough soap opera (forced that too) (player was Andy Rothfusz)
Serpentine, if she counts: smooth blend of all three with maximum hooking-in (my in-group NPC)

Their various back-stories and details led me produce new, more detailed handouts, in tandem with preparing stuff for play. In other words, the new handouts contained a lot of seed material for the first notions I had about what to do. Looking over these handouts, I think they were actually built upon the originals after a few sessions of play.

I knew some major in-play features awaited down the road: revealing that their quite decent patron had been (the real) Doctor Chaos to see what they would do about it, going up against Raptor (his son) and learning what the Disappearance was. But when and how this stuff would happen, I left for later. I tried not to let that overwhelm the question of the moment, which was, what were we doing right now?

more in a minute

Ron Edwards:
Now here’s the important part: specific preparation. As with the Shield game before it, for the Force Five game, I always prepped with five sessions in mind, which I called a chapter. I set up five sessions for which the fifth will climactically resolve the conflicts brought to the fore in the preceding ones. Typically, I’d choose or invent a villain or villain group to be the central problem, thinking in terms of shining a light on what I used to call “campaign history.” I want to stress that the post-prep, post-play result of a given chapter made our “game world” look very deep and detailed, but the depth and detail actually arose from this chapter-prep and play, not from prior work.

As a detail which is interesting in its own right but not immediately to the point here, every chapter or two (i.e. 5-10 sessions), I’d choose up exactly three published adventures or sourcebooks for either Champions or Villains & Vigilantes, and basically cherry-pick anything I liked in them, renaming and retooling as desired, to use in the material I was currently prepping.

I’d also think character-centric, looking at relevant NPCs, especially the “official” ones like Dependent NPCs and Hunteds (non-Champions people, that means hunters of the player-characters), looking at outstanding or time-to-discover issues for the PCs (whether personal or group). I thought about whether the events arising from this musing would be drive vs. distraction, and mystery vs. confrontation.

As with many other Champions players, I followed the advice of the core book to play, name, and number play-sessions as if they were precisely like issues of a comic book.

The first chapter of the Force Five game was called Feather Tigers. It had deepened the “campaign history” and established some characters I’d plan to use throughout the whole campaign, notably Raptor and Patternmaster. In the second session, I’d annihilated the “big” supergroup called the Citadel, using cherry-picked bits from the V&V supplement (There’s a) Crisis at Crusaders’ Citadel); my big twist was that it wasn’t a villain attack, but rather Raptor twisted the world’s premier supergroup into his supervillainous minions. I was pleased with the whole chapter thematically because a lot of the nominal villains were just guys trying to make a buck or deal with a bad break, and a lot of the nominal heroes were superficial and not especially effective jerks. So Force Five gained an internal-motivation mandate to “be better” despite their apparent maximum glitzy flash. However, it wasn’t much of a story; the fifth session simply happened to be especially dangerous.

So I’ll try to explain exactly what went into preparing for the second chapter, which I decided to call Mind Games, after the title of another published sourcebook I’d chosen. In fact, I used quite a bit of it, and had already merged a certain amount of its back-story into my canonical original prep. The big exception was that the organization PSI stood for Paraphysical Studies Insitute and it was not based on psychic/psionic powers, just surreal ones which I built to deconstruct the whole “psionics” trip in the first place.

I also used the Champions supplement Deathwish, greatly altered, turning the textual heavy-metal villains who also happened to be a band into a real band who were not villains at all and openly used their (minor) powers on-stage. My idea for their story role was that the band’s profits were being covertly siphoned away to fund PSI. I can’t for the life of me remember what PSI was actually up to. Something bad.

Merge that with the “our heroes themselves” and “learn some history” material, much of which involved extending opportunities for soap opera. I wanted to show that now, after the Citadel was fallen, the other superheroes in the world were either minor professionals like Deathwish or quite limited in their effectiveness, like Revelation and Fist of God with Christ’s American Church.

So in laying it out by the numbers, the two books’ inclusion and my thoughts on what to do with it all looked something like this:

Session #6: introduce Helene Cheneneaux, who manifests fear-powers and disrupts Deathwish concert, she becomes Chimera; set up Force Five’s home base in Tampa, offer Helene as potential crèche member for Cortex (this worked in #7)
Session #7: introduce PSI member Mind’s Eye, fight their front (and naïve dupes) Christ’s American Church; abduct Albert, Strobe’s DNPC, to get things moving
Session #8: abduct Cortex and Serpentine, introduce turncoat PSI member Omen who helps the team, Strobe vs. PSI assassins in the supervillain prison facility, hence the two youngest members of the team are forced to make a lot of decisions, discover Deathwish funds PSI
Session #9: Deathwish concert, find the PSI mole in the band
Session #10: assault on PSI headquarters

You can see that I relied heavily on abductions for plot hooks which looked more like shepherd’s crooks, but by #9, they were no longer employed because the heroes were on the move on their own at that point, and I had the NPC Omen to provide some impetus as well. I remember that I was amused at having PSI easily located via the phone book once the heroes found out Mind’s Eye’s real name. (I mean, that’s the whole point of a secret identity, right, that you’re fucked if someone finds out? Why should villains not have to worry about that?)

By this point, I was either drawing from a large list of potential session titles, that I was always compiling, or having new ones occur to me. I used them as scheduled about 80% of the time, sometimes coming up with a new name based on what actually happened. In this case, they turned out to be, in order, Haywire, Persecuted for Righteousness’ Sake, Dagger of the Mind, The Heart of Rock and Roll is Still Beating, and Dance of the Seven Veils.

Some other dynamics were also at work. I wanted to provide a justification for getting Cortex out of play because Andy was moving out of town, so turning him to stone in #10 was pretty much a fixed plan. I was accumulating as much soap opera as possible, especially the Helene-Cortex relationship. I really wanted to let the players’ actions set up the events of #10, and see whether they could “do Force Five” without me handing it to them, which turned out well. Basically, they brought down PSI and gained accolades and a sense of a job well done due to their own decisions about how to conduct an operation of this kind.

(I often took a section of the big time-line you saw in the first handout and “deepened” with many details following a given chapter, drawing on what we had established in prep and play. I just found two of these written after about 10 sessions, detailing the histories of the Citadel and PSI.)

(Our third chapter was called “Family Matters” and focused very deeply on character origins, Serpentine being the team patron’s daughter, She-Dragon’s fraught relationship with her over-controlling parents, and stuff like that, all embedded deeply in the overall history/back-story.)

When it worked, the chapter-based prep was incredibly satisfying, because we enjoyed the sense of a story “coming together,” being relevant to characters due to coincidence and due to historical events now coming “home to roost,” and with knowledge that certain crisis/question material would in fact come to an irreducible resolution. Looking over my play accounts in the CT, it’s fascinating how I specified, even twenty years ago, that I absolutely did not want to railroad people into pre-planned climaxes. It required a lot of flexibility and a certain amount of compromise. Sometimes that flexibility turned into “Roads to Rome,” regarding a climax or revelation I simply could not live without, but sometimes it opened up into “well, whatever happens.”

What I didn’t realize was what we were failing to do, which became quite pronounced after the 20th session. (We played out 45 sessions, if I remember correctly, which given the high-content chapter prep, was easily the equivalent of 200 sessions’ worth of content compared to a number of Champs games I was in.)

I can see why that was the transition. It so happened that when the fourth chapter was over, we’d pretty much accounted for the entire original timeline, dealt with the Looming Threat implicit in it, decided what to do with the fact that Doctor Chaos was still alive and their patron, and effectively established Force Five as the real-deal superhero team, perhaps the first one in history.

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.

Anyway, what we needed to do, but failed to happen from that point onwards was character-driven, decision-driven story. Our setting-work completed, we turned toward character development, and the entire crisis of “who’s character is it, anyway?” slowly took root, in different ways per character. It never ruined the game in a climactic sense, but it did itch at all of us. Mike Kent was the guy who brought it up to me; I knew we were having less and less fun, but couldn’t tell why, and he knew what the problem was, but didn’t know why or how it messed up our plots.

We hashed it out to find that neither of us knew how to resolve “GM’s Story” vs. “I play my hero.” I’d finally discovered that even if everyone wanted to do this, and trusted one another to do it well, and in fact did do it with integrity and “fun first” as the point … that it didn’t work.

Remember, I’d played the most astonishing truckload of Champions by this point. I had identified every single intrinsic game-busting problem for me and the people I liked to play with, and with the Force Five game we had resolved them all … only to find that there was one, fundamental, infrastructural detail left: that the basic act of “we make this story,” which we’d considered to be a no-brainer, was broken. I wanted a great story and took responsibility for making sure it happened + Mike wanted to play his character for real + he liked my stories and wanted to enjoy them + I wanted Mike to play his character = Does Not Compute.

You can see it right there in the handout, in a spritely and confident: “Your characters will be the MAIN characters in the story …” What a quagmire awaits below that simple, ordinary, quickly-passed over word, “in.”

At the time, we didn’t resolve it. In retrospect, I can see that my structural approach to preparation was intended to solve the problem of “Will we have a story,” and that I’d socially, creatively, and systemically honed the rather sprawly and potentially broken notion of “play Champions” into non-problematic engine. If we’d all wanted to use Participationist technique to enjoy my stories, we could have done it. But … ultimately, Mike and I, and the others to a lesser extent, thought we were getting problematic stuff out of the way so we could (without using the term or openly understanding the concept) play Narrativist. The problem we uncovered, after succeeding at the first part, was that we did not know how.

The lesson: imposed rising-action structure cannot itself solve the problem of Before vs. After vs. Now. It can be a powerful tool in any play which privileges the production of story, but must properly be recognized as a techniques issue, not an agenda issue.

Although I acquired the deep foundation of experiential data during that time, I didn’t process and apply that lessons until the first Sorcerer games began to fire on all cylinders (The First Ever campaign setting). The real point is simple: shoot the Impossible Thing in the head. What I learned about GMing was articulated and summarized much, much later in Playing Bass (Narrativism essay preview), which for present purposes should be understood as looking at techniques and seeing how they can be tuned and applied toward Narrativist play. As it turned out, despite that thread's title, that material did not get incorporated into Narrativism: Story Now after all, specifically because I realized that people would confound the Techniques-based, CA-neutral issue with the focused, applied-to-Narrativism issue.

My next installment concerns a different sort of structural approach that I and others tried in the mid-1990s with another game, The Babylon Project. I’m open to questions or comments as I go along, so post if you’d like.

Best, Ron

Ron Edwards:
Re-reading those monster posts, I am not sure if I provided the right details to punch my point home.

After episode #20, I lacked the setting-grounding to make open-ended situations, and shifted more toward ending-based thinking when preparing chapters, or toward character-centric thinking which presumed/needed certain things to happen.

The one which may have bugged Mike most, although I think this was an endemic, constant problem for me and the group at the time, concerned the romance that I was hoping to blossom between his character She-Dragon and an NPC, Metalstorm.

Mike was a very, very good role-player as an incipient Narrativist, often somewhat internal insofar as his interest in the material was concerned. She-Dragon (Gwen Collins) was a seven-foot-tall, chromed, gleaming, statuesque babe-and-a-half, sort of a very sexy Colossus without the striations, electric blue eyes, curly red hair (i.e. actual fine wires), with huge oval electromagnetic rainbow wings that manifested somewhat uncontrollably. She was also a classic trope, having been a perfectly normal sixteen-year-old prior to the (origin too detailed for accounting here), basically trapped in this new social and implicitly sexual role and having to grow up fast. Mike cared very deeply about her development as a character, to the extent that pure experiential Actor Stance was his preferred mode of play. He didn't mind if things didn't move along very fast, as long as they eventually did.

The trouble with Metalstorm is clear in retrospect: (i) the character was a hamster wheel in that he had no particular roots in any particular supers or political history; (ii) he was doubly a hamster wheel in that I employed circular logic in thinking that he's there for She-Dragon to be romantically interested in, and assuming she's romantically interested in him, so now we can focus on him and them; and (iii) I proceeded with the relevant breakdown of the romance as if it existed, due to my chapter-based prep.

But the minute that I shifted more toward Story Before (recall the Before/Now balance in our game was already a little uncertain), my role as GM and his more-than-adequate, indeed excellent presence in the game became ... well, immunologically incompatible. And we couldn't figure out why. He knew quite well that a story resulted in great part from protagonist action, but neither of us could figure out how that related to adverse situations and to structural preparation. Thinking back to our conversation, I remember how much it affected me as I worked on early drafts of Sorcerer, and how much it fed directly into the insights I described in the "first campaign" material that I linked to above.

In designing and drafting early Sorcerer, I remember thinking that the relatively limp, unsatisfying later stages of She-Dragon's story were exactly what I was fighting against - I didn't want to provide GM instructions which facilitated that kind of result. But all my skill at GMing Champions, which I immodestly claim ranked as high as anyone's who's played that game, had turned out to be

It shouldn't surprise anyone that all this peaked in the spring of 1992. It so happened that I finished my Master's, caught an insanely horrible case of chicken pox, went to Chicago for the summer, played one last try at Champions to ridiculously bad effect (see Your worst campaign ever?), and during that time, read Over the Edge for the first time.

Anyway, I hope that clarified the situation with Mike and She-Dragon a little bit better. What I'm saying is that although typically I was "that guy" "ruining" someone else's Story Before game, here, I was seeing it from the other side. It wasn't anywhere near as toxic a situation as I've been in, before or since, but in some ways, our dedication to exactly the same aesthetic principles of characters, comics, and stories was contributing to the problem - and we had no systemic means of addressing it.

Side point: That's why "don't be a dick" is not the panacea solution to problems in role-playing, and why I know, when someone says that everything I've written boils down that, that they have no idea what I'm writing about.

Main point: incipient Narrativism, again, is the enemy of Story Before even in its most functional, Participationist arrangement, with the best will in the world on both sides, with absolutely no disconnect in terms of desired content.

Best, Ron

Abkajud:
Sometimes the budding Narrativist in the group will pick an arena within play and Story Now the hell out of it.

Case in point: an unintended disconnect between my expectations and the group's expectations led to some interesting and productive tension.
Basically, I was an Abyssal in an Exalted game. During character creation, I had visions of really sharing the gospel of Oblivion with mortals, of taking on a sort of missionary role, dipped in black-metal aesthetics.
The GM had other, complementary ideas - the Deathlords (my bosses) were completely uninterested in any sort of ideology or proselytism. They were just your standard ruthless bad guys with a skulls-and-death motif.
When I, the idealist, butted heads with their bloodless power games, things really, really took off. At first I didn't understand what was going on - I got frustrated (as a player) that these NPCs didn't see things my way, that they didn't care. So what did I do? I decided that I would show that I cared, through play, even if no one else got it (NPCs or my fellow players).
My apotheosis came when a rogue Deathlord crossed our path, with a Solar war party hot on its trail. My fellow Abyssals fought the creature, and somewhere in there I decided, "Fuck it, I don't wanna serve Oblivion any more!"
I crossed the battlefield and threw myself at the Solar's feet, begging them to take me on as a prisoner-cum-faithful servant. The GM gave me a really weird look and said, "Ok, they're willing to trust you for now."

Honestly, if the GM had "cooperated" by making NPCs my allies in my cause, I don't think it would have been very interesting. Conflict was central to my enjoyment of the emerging theme, and it did emerge, in spite of the mechanics and the play group, but it pretty much only happened "to me". And the limitations to this "don't mind me!" approach are obvious - it's unreliable and the game (and the group) will likely fight you if you try to do it this way.

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