How Glorantha both inspired and frustrated my play.
Web_Weaver:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 13, 2011, 09:54:50 AM
Jamie, I think that if you want to discuss your own experiences – which are, effectively, Narrativist play in a deep setting context – then you’ll have to jettison Story Before issues from the discussion entirely, and talk about something else. Or if you want to talk about those issues, then you’ll have to take off those Story Now lenses entirely.
And there in lies the rub, because the experience in this instance was frustrated incipient narrativism on my part, in a campaign that was quite clearly being plotted by the GM and probably didn't have a particularly coherent agenda.
BUT
That sudden awakening of the potential of my character and its interaction with the setting on a transformational scale is the context of that experience. Making it difficult to express it without viewing it from that angle.
Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to express the catch 22 situation that I was in?
Or maybe I would be better off just explaining what the potential was thereby providing an example of how setting and character can interact?
Any thoughts?
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 13, 2011, 09:54:50 AM
I think the problem is illustrated by your brief summary of Story Before (“what it means to me” as you put it) and your use of the term Character Exploration, which at the fully abstract, all-CA level of Big Model talk, are both full of wailing siren alarms for me, begging for dissection and discussion and clarification.
Problem here is I have a very abstract brain, and I was responding myself to the wailing siren alarms in my head from the very mention of Story Before, and then the switch to red alert as soon as Story Before Participationism was raised.
I was worried that it may encourage a "Story Before Participationism = CA / discuss" which seems likely to become a big can of worms. (I'm not interested in opening that so step away from the can opener everyone.)
Jamie
Web_Weaver:
Quote from: Paul Czege on November 12, 2011, 06:26:21 PM
The idea of "pruning" as a fundamental contribution is pretty thought provoking. A lot of the conflicts the first time I ever played Universalis were about what should not be allowed in the story. The mechanics worked brilliantly for this, and the resulting story was pretty powerful. In conch-style games that give players uncontestable full-bore story power I've seen a lot of ridiculous stories that players try to convince themselves are awesome. Why are there so few games that recognize the importance of "everyone gets to prune"?
Yes, indeed the GM.of my example game equates Story Now as that kind of Gonzo Story, which puts him totally off th whole idea.
Pruning as narrowing of options is certainly more compatible with a more traditional strong setting play, and, is certainly a Story Now supporting concept as long as the pruning is being done in the moment.
Quote from: Abkajud on November 13, 2011, 08:56:20 AM
So does pruning mean veto power, or the ability to go back and retroactively remove things from the "pool" of available subjects, setting elements, etc.?
Neither in the context I am focusing on. It is purely as a narrowing down of potential story directions. If during play you are concious of the overall potential options for the story as a group, and you are selectively choosing which options are not interesting or relevant then effectively you are directing the story in the now. If the GM, between sessions, is choosing which directions are suitable for his own aesthetic sensibilities and or preconceived direction then he is applying Story Before in a reflexive manner. He may mistake this for Story Now (I know I fell into this trap before I really understood what I was doing) if he perceives his role as story guide.
I suppose you could view it as veto power, but I am focusing on the growth potential of the plant rather than the removal of unwanted growth.
Web_Weaver:
For context, I love transformational stories. The kind where the world is a certain rigid way, and a character or group of characters change the status quo and reshape the world.
However, I have never had much time for the theory that in drama either the characters change or the world changes around them. For these kinds of stories to work for me, they have to be about the interaction between the world and character, and both must be changed. The story is set up as unstoppable force versus immovable object, and is about how this seemingly unresolvable situation gets resolved through a transformation.
On one level this kind of story is mythology.
Which brings me back to Glorantha, a setting all about mythology.
So I am going to look back at my Hero-Wars character and try and tease out just how redolent with potential he was, and why this was both a function of setting and character. And hopefully, help explain how Story-Now play is entirely compatible with this kind of strong setting.
My character was Ham, and he begun more as an exercise in wresting as much out of a 100 word description as possible, without making the character a traditional mini-max character. The standard thing to do if you wanted a powerful character out of the blocks, was to make them a devotee of a powerful deity with cool magics, but the rules suggest that any skill is the equal to any spell or any personality trait.
So I ended up with an initiate who specialised in guiding adventurers to Snake Pipe Hollow. He was a bit of a loner with a murky past and maybe a bit of a rogue, but at around 30 years old was beginning to see the appeal of settling down.
In RuneQuest terms this guy is pointless, so I was keen to see if HW lived up to the promise of making any character fun.
We were playing in an Orlanthi tribe in Furthest, which is surrounded by Trolls, Elves, Giants and Chaos and has become a frontier province of the Lunar Empire. It is very ripe for adventure.
In the first few sessions we killed a dragon by using a dormant water spirit which my character communed with and this connection with spirits and water was expanded upon by me at every stage possible because it felt cool, and because the local environment is dominated by the Skyfall, a huge fall of water from beyond the sky dome where the god Sky River Titan was pierced. So it felt right thematically to get into the water thing.
(more detail to come tomorrow)
Web_Weaver:
In a session a few weeks later my character decided to try and gain some information from some river spirits, I cant remember the context, but it was probably about looking for a place or some people that may have camped near the river. Anyway, I had previously taken a relationship with the water spirit of the nearby seasonal stream that had helped us with the dragon, so I decided to name drop as a way of attracting a water spirits attention. I ended up in a conversation with an intelligent fish who needed convincing that I was a friend, so I started expounding on an ideology for my character.
And this is the point at which the whole setting opened up for my character.
I detailed how in one way, because the river network and thereby the landscape Furthest was all dominated by the rainfall of the Skyfall, we were all children of the Sky-river, we were all nourished by its waters and we were all carrying his water in our blood. Becuse of this, whenever chaos threatened our land we owed it to Sky River Titan to do as his blood did (water of the Skyfall) and cleanse chaos from our land.
In the short term that did the trick with the fish and he told us what he knew, but for me there were endless possibilities for dramatic situations in that simple ideology. The kinds of situations that could put my loner initiate with little to mark him out in the Orlanthi religious community up against the priests or clan ring in a bid to get them to unify against the Lunar Oppressors. Could get me to use my background knowledge of the local trolls to try and get a faction of them onside. It could involve diplomacy with the other races of the area, who knows what kinds of situations it would lead towards.
I also saw a probable personal tragedy in this ideology, by slowly turning myself into a rallying point for an uprising, I would be exposing my character to lots of problems he wasn't equipped to handle. He was a loner with few friends in his community, he was charismatic but not political, and he was naive. He wouldn't see coming the extremist type of ideology that might arise from this kind of politics: unifying against a common enemy by highlighting concepts of nation/blood v foreign chaos tainted rulers.
Because the very landscape and peoples of the setting are so full of mythology, conflict and potential for dynamic action, it is no co-incidence that this potential emerged. It is sitting there ready for anyone to explore. With the right choice of characters and location on the map these things are Story Now waiting to happen.
Web_Weaver:
Quick note on Mythological Theory.
One of the things that is most difficult in current role paying games is the nature of character / setting interaction. And, at the top of my thread I suggest that I prefer the interaction to be both ways by some form of transformation.
This may seem difficult to achieve, and much narrative theory tends to stick to simple cases. But, any student of mythology would probably be able to draw parallels between this idea and Structuralism.
Structuralism is not the most current and fashionable method of studying mythology, but I firmly believe it has a lot to teach us in roleplaying. The most common out working of this theory is the identification of myth as reconciling the concepts of Nature and Culture. With the myth not using logical or procedural methods but rather symbolic connections. The protagonist in the myth demonstrates how seemingly different concepts can be seen as the same, and thereby changing both the perceived reality of the situation. It effectively changes both nature and culture through providing a way of looking at the situation.
For an example of this odd situation in drama see the end of the third Matrix movie. A film massively under rated from my perspective, due to its handling of these themes.
Ok I will try and step away from heavy theory in this thread for now, but it will inform some of what I say next.
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