How to enjoy Story Before without Participationism
Josh Porter:
Fair enough, Callan. I guess that did sound a bit pretentious on my part. I suppose the reason I feel un-douchey about trying to get him into indie games is that he fucking loves Apocalypse World and wants to run it. I would love to play in that game. It kind of seems like running DFRPG is his learning curve toward running non-Story-Before games. So if he's going to run AW in the future, there are some kinks that need to be worked out, which he is consciously doing and asking for advice on.
So I'm still kind of a douche, but at least not a completely self-absorbed one.
adam m:
Honestly, the rulebook for Apocalypse World might do a better job of what you're trying to do here than you can. There's something, to me, about the rulebook stating "DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I'm not fucking around", that makes it less objectionable than a fellow player saying the same thing.
Josh Porter:
So earlier this week we played this game again, after a break for Christmas. And I had tons of fun. Here's what happened.
In the Fiction
The group had found the home of the dead sasquatch at the end of the previous session and found her body floating in a pool. So Lloyd decided to go take her body into the Nevernever as a prequel to a funeral, as is the bigfoot way. While I did that, the others investigated her home and found a trail camera, partially dismantled, with a pipe bomb inside. They put the pipe bomb inside a dead elk (it was already there) and rigged it to explode to soften the blow and get rid of the dangerous device. Lloyd happened to emerge back from the Nevernever just in time to get exploded upon. He got some bad burns.
Stuart (another PC) found some bootprints and had a flash of insight. He knew who the prints belonged to: Randy Doakes, infamous bigfoot hunter. Lloyd became incensed, caught Randy's scent and tracked him down. The others tried to keep up with his pace. Well, Randy's compound was found, encircled with claymore mines and rigged with motion sensing spotlights. Lloyd, in anger, charged straight through the minefield and demanded to know why Randy killed Rachel (the dead sasquatch). Randy was confused for two reasons. A) Lloyd turned back into a regular human around Randy's "home" (Sasquatches are like were-apes kind of. The farther into the wilderness they are, the more ape-like. The further into civilization, more human-like), and B) he didn't even know she was dead.
A touching apology scene followed where Lloyd calmed the fuck down and they looked at footage from some trail cameras to find Rachel's killer. What do you know? It appears that Chu-luun (the sasquatch who told Lloyd to look for Rachel) was the last thing caught by the camera. Spooooooky... The group heads back into the Nevernever to give Rachel a proper funeral, and are interrupted by Chu-luun and a yeti posse accusing Lloyd of murder. End of session.
Around the Table
I started the session with an agenda: create an emotional or dramatic hook for myself to up my investment in the game right from the get-go. So I purposely got Lloyd caught in a pipe bomb explosion. The GM was confused as to why I would want my character hurt, but I pushed it a little and he let me do it. It was a great choice. Lloyd was now pissed-off enough to justify some more emotionally-charged play, so when boot prints were found, I had him bent on vengeance. Hooray! A character goal! It was super fun to roleplay. He stormed off through the woods, forcing his friends to follow, and shrugging off most of their advice. If he happened to step in a trap or something, I was totally fine with that. But he didn't.
When Randy's home was found, I pushed harder, trying to convince the others to give me the other pipe bomb we found on the way so I could light it and throw it into his house. No one would go for it, so I braved the claymores (which didn't go off, to my surprise) and went straight up to the man I thought killed my friend. I asked the GM for a compel at this point. I wanted to reach through the tiny window and yank this dude out by his head. But the GM turned me down, saying "That's not really where I want this scene to go." BUT, he offered me another compel instead. He compelled me to turn back into human form, taming my rage a bit, as Lloyd is a bit of an old hippie as a human. The conversation during which I apologized to Randy was awesome and touching, and felt incredibly real. And then the rest of the session was just gravy on top.
I think the real difference for me, in terms of my enjoyment, was finding an honest-to-goodness character goal. It's a hard thing to do sometimes in a Story Before game. But I think that finding it here was what made all the difference. I wonder if I can find it again next week...
pawsplay:
Something about this post jumped out at me. I've been in games where I felt dragged along. On the one hand, I sometimes resented the GM's pre-judgments about what would be good play, but on the other, I also knew I was responsible for my own engagement and enjoyment. Story Now and other approaches and tools are often directed at GMs, asking them to let go of outcomes and let the events unfold naturally. So why not embrace that as a player? So what if all roads lead to Rome. As long as I treat my character and their actions honestly, I still get the real story of how they went to England and fought a zombie on a train, or whatever, with the whole-roleplaying experience. Now, ultimately, if the game just limps along, direct communication is key, just like you did. It's like when you watch some old B-movie that turns out to be a real treat, and part of it is they got some old A-list actors in it. But these guys are troopers, and they don't act embarassed to be a B-movie. They just act the hell out of it. Or they ham it up. So if you end in the RPG equivalent of a lesser episode of Star Trek, you can still be Patrick Stewart about it.
So yeah. Roleplay the Hell out of that character!
Thanks for posting the updates and stuff. It's very cool and interesting to hear the process of developing the narrative from a player standpoint.
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