How to enjoy Story Before without Participationism
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey Josh,
As I’m a bit of an advocate of Story Before Participationism (SBP) around here, I feel a need to clarify the following: What you are describing in your first post with “driving from one diner to the next” may be SBP, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s pointless and lame. I’ve seen this kind of games, where most of the session consist of the GM dropping breadcrumbs and revealing the back story bit by bit, at an annoyingly slow pace, just to get to the inevitable boss fight at the end.
Now maybe that isn’t all your game is about, maybe the GM’s plot (okay, his 2-3 alternative plots) contain interesting and somewhat surprising turns and some meaningful challenges to the players and characters (yep, they have their place in SBP). But if so, you don’t mention them. Typically I would guess the back story is quite cool and Dresden-esque, but all the characters ever do is hear about it, and fight the bad guy at the end.
What I have to give your GM credit for, he is very up-front about his GM style. He did not let you get away with your childish attempts of disrupting his game at all, instead firmly communicating his expectations without getting rude. However, this would be much more admirable if the rest of the group were actually enjoying his GM style. As you describe it, he seems to be doing it more or less out of habit and nobody really digs it, not in this game and not in the L5R game before.
I’m skeptical whether those emails and more talk along those lines will be helpful. From my experience, in particular when talking on an abstract level, miscommunication is inevitable as everyone is caught up in their way of thinking. Callan is right: When your GM says he wants you to be more pro-active, he means he wants you to do what he expects you to do without him having to basically force it down your throat, as in the Yeti example. He would have to think completely outside his box to even conceive the possibility that interesting things could happen in any other way then the GM setting them up to happen.
Sorry to be so discouraging, but I’m afraid you’re beating a dead horse. Please don’t blame SBP, though. In my capacity as the unofficial emissary of SBP-land here at the Forge, I might try and explain how I would run such a game with more fun and stronger participation of the players, if you’re interested. But I guess what you really want is not better SBP and a coherent Sim game, it’s Bass-Playing and a coherent Nar game. Unfortunately, FATE as a game system is pretty ambiguous between those two.
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
P.S.: I just skimmed over the older thread you linked, and this quote stands out to me:
Quote
In addition, there are very few players in my group who are interested in the other characters. People will pull out their phones/iPads/etc. whenever someone else has the spotlight.
Man, that's not a good sign. Beating a dead horse, I say.
Alfryd:
Quote from: Frank Tarcikowski on December 21, 2011, 05:51:48 AM
I’m skeptical whether those emails and more talk along those lines will be helpful. From my experience, in particular when talking on an abstract level, miscommunication is inevitable as everyone is caught up in their way of thinking. Callan is right: When your GM says he wants you to be more pro-active, he means he wants you to do what he expects you to do without him having to basically force it down your throat, as in the Yeti example.
If the sole purpose of the players is to do what you expect, why do you even want players? As far as I can tell, Lloyd as a character had perfectly good reasons for not telling the rest of the group, and if the GM failed to pick up on that, it's unfair to blame the player for it.
I don't understand how GMs that insist on allowing players only in-character knowledge about their environment can then expect their characters to act based on out-of-character motives (i.e, what will keep the GM happy.)
Frank Tarcikowski:
Ah, what the heck, I guess all I needed was an excuse to procrastinate today. So I wrote a lengthy post about how I would run such a game as SBP. Maybe it serves to highlight what a functional SBP game with the given group and game might look like, so you can see if that’s what you want, or not. Or at least it can show that SBP needs not be lame. Feel free to ignore it if it’s derailing the discussion.
Okay, so let’s say this group wasn’t a dead horse to begin with, and let’s say this group was interested in playing SBP. They are not interested in engaging in “spotlight scenes” for single characters, so we need group action most of the time. If left to themselves, they like to hang out at the local waterhole, which is fine. These hang-out scenes will give them the opportunity to portray their characters (show to the other players what their characters are like), and reflect on the GM-driven plot events. But when they are not hanging out, I don’t want them poking around in the fog. I want to give them a clear objective of what to do.
So I need to set them up with a strong group objective. I cannot have them be just a random handful of supernatural people in the Dresdenverse, that will never work out. They need a reason to stick together, and a good hook to draw them into the GM-driven plot. They can’t all be Harry Dresden, the lone wolf. But they do need that job that will get them into all kinds of trouble. That’s what I’ll lay out to the players at the very start, then pass the ball.
Let’s say they come up with something. Let’s say they’re all college students and part of a secret club of supernatural beings, sort of naïve like Billy and the Alphas, and not as secret as they’d like, so people who get into supernatural trouble have a habit of asking them for help, and their code of conduct is to help those in need. I might request each of them to dedicate one Aspect to this secret club or code of conduct.
Their hangout, then, is a bar near campus where “small” supernatural folk and new age idiots mix but no serious white council wizard would ever dream of spending his time. Maybe they have a bit of personal stuff cooking on the side, that’s fine, I won’t want to play that out at length with every single player unless I can use it as a plot hook, but I’ll address it in fast forward mode from time to time. The crush on that goth chick. The trouble with the philosophy class. The visit from the grand parents at the worst imaginable time. In the Dresden vibe, these personal things can either be complications to the “mission”, or comic relief, or both.
And now for the main part.
1) Putting the Story in Story Before
Now I come up with a back story. Some evil scheme, some supernatural trouble that will lead to disaster if nobody interferes. I’ll keep it straight and simple. The Dresden novels are sometimes pretty layered and you won’t know what’s really going on for a long time, but you can’t craft an RPG session that way, it just requires too much scripting. So I just come up with a straightforward plot, hopefully spiced with some appropriate Dresden-esque absurdity, and a handful of interesting NPCs caught up in the plot. Then I come up with exactly one second layer: What I will make the players believe is going on, before they discover what is really going on. I won’t try to be subtle: Subtlety is too often lost when a bunch of role-players are talking all at once. They should smell the ruse pretty easily.
Then I come up with a plot hook, someone to ask the characters for help or maybe some personal stuff of one or two characters that I can use to draw them into the plot. This must not be a weak hook because in order to get into their characters and enjoy playing them, the players need a convincing motivation. So I will dedicate some thought to the plot hook. In particular, I need a good answer to the question: “Why don’t they just call the cops?” (Or the White Council, or whatever?) Why should they do it on their own?
After I’ve hooked the characters, I’ll spring my “outside layer” at them pretty quickly and completely (with a few obvious missing links), so they have a lot of information to work with. They can start investigating and I’ll give them two or three pretty obvious places or persons to seek out. Important note: Every one of these should actually lead somewhere! No red herrings. No breadcrumbs. Person A does not send them to person B who sends them to person C. Person A tells them something new that gives them an important clue about the “inside layer”, either by telling them outright, or by telling a blatant lie that they see through immediately. Or the characters get into a fight when they go looking for person A. Or person A might be persuaded to help the characters, which will help them but won’t produce a dead end if they cannot secure person A’s help.
I’ll have an emergency plan up my sleeve how I can reveal the “inside layer” if the players don’t figure it out by themselves, but I won’t use that too soon, they should get their chance to draw the right conclusions (and if they do, I’ll reassure them OOC that they’ve got it). At this point, I will want to allow for some flexibility. The bad guys need to be stopped, but after the players have learned what the bad guys are up to, they can try to stop them in whatever way they like (I’ll try to offer them some weak spot or special weapon without making it a do-or-die solution). Whatever plan they cook up, I’ll usually roll along with it and try to steer things in such way that the tension builds toward a dramatic climax, using the tools I have at hand, like improbable coincidence or the sudden appearance of an old friend or enemy… and maybe I’ll have one last nasty surprise at hand which I may or may not decide to use, depending on how things evolve.
I’ll have some outcomes that I need to happen but they will normally be what the story is obviously steering towards anyway, maybe with a little twist. I don’t like scripted endings that turn everything upside down. I know some players appreciate them but I as a player, I mostly find them annoying, so I don’t use them as GM either.
2) Putting the Participation in Participationism
Once you note that certain things are just going to happen no matter what, you can accept these things and take your liberties elsewhere. Sure you as a player want to make some sort of meaningful impact on the group’s experience of play and on the fiction. It is not enough to just trot along and sometimes roll dice as the GM narrates what happens. But some things are just not up for negotiation.
No, you won’t turn down the “mission”. It is my job as GM to make sure the mission is acceptable to your character, or we will collaborate to achieve that. And no, you won’t be running off from the mission to chase your long-lost high school love interest. If you want to chase your long-lost high school love interest, you will tell me, the GM, and a few sessions down the road, you might just find that she is somehow involved in your next mission in some sort of shady way. And of course you’ll ask your friends and fellow player characters to help you rescue her, because that’s just how our game rolls.
But that doesn’t mean there is nothing meaningful for you to do. Your witty banter with the other PCs will be well remembered and who knows, maybe they will even forget their iPad as you swear your undying love to your high school darling, just before the demon she pledged her soul to takes her away to the Never-Never.
And when you try to persuade that moody spirit to help you with a potion, you’ll have to play it well or you’ll have to go without the potion. (The good guys will probably still win, but you’ll need me to pull my punches, whereas when you pull out that potion to save the day, you have every reason to be smug!) And when you fight those thugs in the early stages of the story, sure you can’t die and probably you can’t even really lose much, but if you as player fuck up, your character will look like an idiot and while that can be fun every once in a while, it should be your ambition as a player to make your character look badass instead. It’s not a competition, really, if everybody gets to be badass, that’s fine, but you’ve got to sell it to us so we buy it.
This is how my SBP games roll.
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
Quote from: Alfryd on December 21, 2011, 08:03:12 AM
As far as I can tell, Lloyd as a character had perfectly good reasons for not telling the rest of the group, and if the GM failed to pick up on that, it's unfair to blame the player for it.
I don't understand how GMs that insist on allowing players only in-character knowledge about their environment can then expect their characters to act based on out-of-character motives (i.e, what will keep the GM happy.)
Well, if I interpreted correctly, Josh made those "perfectly good reasons" up on the spot because he was annoyed by the GM's spoon-feeding techniques and wanted to derail him.
Amen for the second paragraph, though. This whole "good role-players don't use OOC knowledge" stuff is just bogus.
- Frank
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