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Author Topic: Game; Story  (Read 11479 times)

-E.

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Game; Story
« Reply #195 on: October 12, 2006, 10:48:50 AM »
Quote from: Levi Kornelsen
I like my story-making mechanics to be part and parcel of the regular stuff.

I loathe "plot chips" and the like.

I adore escalation and fallout in DitV.

That way, I can play the game and simply trust that it will create story, rather than focusing on "making story happen".


I connect to your desire to just play the game and trust that a story will happen. How does escalation accomplish that (I'm somewhat familiar with DiTV rules, but if it's specific and mechanical, I might need a quick overview to understand the answer)

Cheers,
-E.
 

Keran

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Game; Story
« Reply #196 on: October 13, 2006, 02:42:45 PM »
Quote from: John Morrow
Is that really a desire for a story or something else?

I think of it as a desire for a particular kind of story.  I don't have any strong objection to somebody describing it as Threefold simulationism, but the Threefold was invented mostly by people whose concerns are similar but not identical to mine, and there are places where it just doesn't describe what I really do; it has some implicit assumptions that don't match my approach.  It's not so bad as a rough description, but often when I need to analyze a campaign for practical reasons, I need to get a lot more explicit about what my ruleset is and about how the audience, genre, driving element, desired tone, and medium affect my choice of techniques and resolutions.

I'm not saying it's wrong, dead wrong, just wrong all along.  The rgfa discussions were useful for pointing out some things I'd sensed nebulously but never managed to state, and stating them explicitly was good.  But since not everything in the Threefold is a good match for my practice, and since it's limited in scope anyway, I couldn't make further progress if I stopped with it.  I got most of my further insights from fiction-writing.  I don't insist that everyone should find it equally useful, but I'm trying to describe why I do.

(And I'm going to have to knock it off soon because my campaign needs some prep work.)

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Well, a good story is a combination of different considerations, and that's certainly one of them.  But the way most writers deal with that problem is to adjust the character to fit the plot the same way they'd adjust the plot to fit the character.  While I know you said you've rejected the Threefold, but I think your concerns for character fidelity is very similar to what Immersive players are looking for.

That's because I am one.

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As for stories being drained [of] force because of implausibility, I agree.  But I think that it doesn't necessarily take something like over-the-top action to create the problem for me.  One can notice the hands of a writer making a story happen in certain ways, sometimes even if the writer is trying to be subtle about it.  A lot of it has to do with thinks like making sure that every rifle on the mantle eventually gets used and that everything gets tied up by the end.  That's my concern with a GM and players applying story quality techniques to role-playing games.  I think they can create the sort of implausibility for me that you are talking about as draining the force from a story.


Feeling the pressure of a plot or a sense of predestination of a character's actions bothers me with or without over the top action.  I'm not sure exactly what all the factors are that lead up to that; the last time it was more a sense that my PC's abilities had been curtailed in order to put another PC in the starring role in a Come to Power story.  If I'd felt that it was natural that he ended up being supporting cast it wouldn't have bothered me, because I've sometimes intentionally played a character likely to fall into that role; but it didn't feel natural. -- That it happened in setup, in this case, didn't mitigate the effect.

About story quality -- I don't think that story quality is a single thing that you have either more or less of.

I wrote two stories I meant to sell, and I sold each of them to minor markets, but not at random.  They were very different kinds of stories, and in my estimation there's still no way I ever could have sold a story like the short short to the editor who bought the novelette, or a story like the novelette to the editor who bought the short short.

The short short was plot-driven, tightly written, had a point so obvious it was heavy-handed, punchy, and conventional.  The novelette was setting-driven, threatened at times to be two different stories surreptitiously joined together by sleight-of-pen, had an ambiguous ending, and barely comes to a resolution. It was also subversive commentary on other works, and it doesn't have its full force except when read as such.

If you tried to translate these two stories into another medium -- television -- they'd need different handling.  The short short could go over practically unaltered in general approach to a half-hour horror anthology, except that I think you'd need to add some material (which there's room for) to make it fill the time slot: it's a very TVish sort of story already.  It would end up saying the same thing, being the same story.  I suppose the different versions would be about equally good.

The novelette would get altered in a fashion that some writers might be inclined to complain of as butchery.  First, some elements in it that are mostly commentary on another obscure work would be dramatic deadwood and wouldn't appear.  Second, it isn't primarily structured as a suspense-adventure story now; it has the material for one in it, however, and that's how a scriptwriter would likely recast it.  The beginning, which has no dialogue or opportunity for same and focuses on the setting and on character introspection, would get chopped.  The TV version would start farther along, with essential information from the beginning written into dialogue instead.  The middle would be a tale of suspense and escape.  The ambiguous and introspective ending would get rewritten too -- it simply won't come across in a primarily visual medium; it would be easy to make it end either well or badly for the protagonist, depending on the sort of story desired.  It could be made to work, to succeed in a visual medium with an audience with mainstream tastes, I believe; but it will not be the same story.  It will end up saying something different.

Which story is better?  Which version of the novelette would be better?

There's no question that the short short conforms better to popular taste in plots -- it's TVish as written.  But the novelette suited the audience it was intended for better than the short short would have; and while some of the changes that somebody would make to adapt it to TV are the result of going from a written to a visual medium, another is the loss of layers of meaning and reflection because those don't accord with popular taste in plots.  Would that be improving it?  I guess it'd be making it better in one way and worse in another.

In RPGs we have a situation where the techniques that are likely to produce tight plotting are likely to seriously damage character identification and suspension of disbelief for some players.  I'm not sure that this impresses me as entirely different from the case of the novelette: if I make the campaign better in one way I may make it worse in another,  and what I should do depends on the audience I want to please.  I can say with the Threefold, but I can also say it in the language of fiction-writing, without my needing to accept all the baggage of the forced tradeoff model of the Threefold.

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I absolutely agree, and that's exactly the sort of game that I enjoy.  But I don't think that's what a lot of GMs and players have in mind when they set out to create good stories.  Why?  Because you seem quite willing to accept the risk of failure and so am I.  But once a good story result becomes the primary concern and the objective is to guarantee that the game is a good story, there comes a point where the GM and players need to make a choice between failure and a good story and by choosing the good story, all of that real suspense that you are talking about and I fully agree with you about evaporates, just as it does in action movies where you know the hero won't die.  As I've said elsewhere, the problem comes from GMs and players trying to make the game play like a good story, and being willing to force a good story to happen at the expense of other concerns.

There may be a reason for my willingness to accept the risk of failure.  Ironically, my trying to guarantee that a good story happens in play is one of the best ways I can think of to guarantee that one won't.  I get fake-feeling cliche or melodrama rather than genuine creativity.   Bleah.

More later.

Keran

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Game; Story
« Reply #197 on: October 14, 2006, 04:29:12 PM »
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I have a character who's undead, and I want to see how he copes with that, so the magic in his setting is not capable of returning him to life. Having him returned to life would make me miss what makes him interesting. Having him wanting to return to life, and having someone in the setting able and willing to do so, but having him prevented by some half-baked obstacle that probably doesn't really make sense wouldn't be any too satisfying either.
That's fine, but there are many ways that the character can cope with being undead that are simply not interesting stories.  This goes back to the point I made earlier about Othello and Hamlet and matching character to story.  How Hamlet or Othello would cope with each other's situations is not nearly as interesting as how they coped with their own situations.  

Also, there are reasons why apparently half-baked obstacles could produce a superior story to simply making the magic unable to return the character to life.  Having the possibility (or even false possibility) of being returned to life could make a very dramatic difference in the way in which a character copes with being undead, including denial and refusal to accept their fate.  Such a story could, for example, be written as an allegory for someone dying of cancer who believes they can be cured, even if they personally can't.  Closing the possibility of a return to life to force your character into a very narrow selection of options also close off certain ways of exploring how the character copes with their fate.

Mrrf.  The way I stated that is downright misleading.  It sounds like I consciously decided that the magic doesn't work that way, and that isn't really what happened.

This is an immersible character.  As an essential part of the character concept, I know that he won't be returning to life: it isn't going to happen.  (The things I know about immersible characters sometimes involve their futures, as well as their pasts and their presents.)  Further, when I'm channelling him the thought that he might be able to do so isn't one he's thinking about, and he's a highly competent magical theorist and research mage: he ought to have some idea.  Also, both my conscious understanding and my channelling of the world indicate that the magic doesn't work that way.  I hypothesize that the character and the magic have these characteristics because of my interest in seeing how he copes with being undead, but since the creation process is subconscious, I can't swear to it.

So it doesn't really matter what kind of dramatic potential a possible return to life story may have; it couldn't be true of the character I know.

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On rec.games.frp.advocacy, Mary Kuhner described how to do planning and revision to control the quality of games played with Immersive characters being played true to character.  I've also revised gone back and revised a game-destroying event in a game I was playing in by figuring out why the scene went wrong and gently nudging my characters perception of what was happening to change the choices they made.  So I would argue that there are ways to remain true to character and scene and get the character to make different choices, though it may be easier for some characters than others (e.g., a character that relies on intuition can be manipulated by manipulating their gut feelings while a character that follows set processes might be difficult if not impossible to manipulate).

The "we don't want Markus to kill Sanjay and then get killed by Chernoi" example?  Yeah, I may avoid results that catastrophic if there's a way to do so that doesn't break any immersible characters.  If there isn't, well ... crash!  Because there's no point in trying to continue with broken characters anyway.  But some models are amenable to tweaking in certain places.

I can't change the output of an immersible character model without changing the input in some way, particularly if we're talking about the kind of strong reaction that's likely to be a campaign-destroyer.  But rolling back and changing an input is often, if not always, a viable approach.

My world models have definite areas where I know what the true state of affairs is, which I can't change, and indefinite areas where I don't know, where either branch A or branch B is possible.  When we play through one of these decision points, I need to pick A or B; but while sometimes that means the model assumes a definite state where A is true if I picked A, at other times it doesn't -- it may not actually collapse the quantum superposition.  And in that case I can roll back and take the B path instead without breaking anything; and if the results of picking A are more disruptive the campaign than the retcon, I'll do the retcon.  Or if I can foresee a situation where A is very, very bad, I might pick B for that reason.  If I did things like this often I'd end up with noticeable artificial biasing patterns, but I don't make a large percentage of decisions this way.

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If you are given the choice between being true to character and setting or manipulating play to make sure that at least one significant conflict gets resolved, which do you choose?  I should also point out that "satisfactory" isn't necessarily good.

The former.  But that's not something I've ever had come up in practice, because the only thing that's ever prevented the characters from resolving at least one thing is the premature ending of a campaign for real life reasons.  Since I tend to discuss the scenario setup pretty extensively before we start a campaign, and since I tend to build the scenarios around the characters, so far I haven't had a case come up where the PCs decide to drop everything and move to Lower Tibia to raise emus.

That's one of the things writing did for me -- I got a lot better at campaign setup, after a lot of experience trying different approaches to fix the verse narrative structure, and also after critiquing other people's stories.  I ended up doing a lot of thinking about things like "Why is this character addressing this problem and not some other problem?" and "Who is actually carrying the main action in this story?  Is it the intended protagonist or someone else? Who should it be?" and "Is the protagonist the narrator?  Should they be?"  When I got back to GMing after several years away from roleplaying for rl reasons, I had a much better idea of how to set up a scenario for the characters on hand, and how to vet new character proposals to make sure that the character has a valid route in-world to being able to take effective action in the scenario, and a reason for doing so.

In contrast, the common approach to plot in RPGland rarely even involves consideration of this essential idea of good plotting in writing -- to make sure that either that the plot addresses the nature of the character, or that the character is one suited to the plot.  In writing it doesn't matter which end one starts from, or whether one does some of both, but it does matter a lot that one makes a match between the two.  Berkman screwed up the ability to talk about this in rgfa by going around saying "Character is plot!" while coming up with examples in which it clearly wasn't, in which the plot had no particular connection to the characters, or even was expected to override character.  But what it really means is they need to mesh.

When I was buying RPG books I don't recall any useful comments on the subject in GMing advice sections; and I do remember reading module after module in which all the advice on plot direction involves arbitrary forces of events, with hardly a glimmer of the notion that the natures of the character as individuals affects what actions they ought to take.  That's reasonable enough if you're playing it strictly as a game and the characters are pawns; but as story creation advice it's very bad.

The lack of attention to the relation between character nature and action is a giant blind spot in traditional RPGs.  The actual working definition of 'plot' in RPGland is: "A plot is an arbitary sequence of events forced on the characters from on high, irrespective of their natures.  If the plot is not forced on the PCs, then the GM will instead a construct a plot using vastly more powerful NPCs who carry the main action and are thereby the main characters in fact."  It's perfectly possible to get by in RPGland with 'plot' routinely given this connotation, but as soon as I took up writing again I began to see it as intolerable nonsense.  It is a completely destructive idea, and I shed it.

The only major roleplaying group I am aware of that routinely addresses the matter of suiting dramatic action to the PCs is the Forge, and they screw it up.  They wrap a couple of good insights in an impenetrable jargon that makes rgfa's look positively pellucid, and in a body of theory that ignores the repeatedly stated concerns of many players.  Then they go designing and speaking in a fashion suggesting that they believe that the only way to construct stories in collaboration is with mechanical rules that are elevated to a position of authority above any of the participants, because the creators cannot be collaborating cooperatively, but must be operating in competition with each other to establish their own ideas, with little attempt at consensus.  (Which is why the GM must be depowered: he actually is in competition with the players for control of the narrative.)  A design that does not have rules for managing competition between the players for the metaworld story-shaping game cannot have been intended by a well-informed designer for creating stories, because that is the only way to make them. :rolleyes:

Still more later.

Keran

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Game; Story
« Reply #198 on: October 15, 2006, 02:33:03 AM »
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First, any subset of the possibilities inherent in a character or setting can feel artificial if you notice things are bounded and limited.  Thus where real life has effectively unlimited possibilities, life in a good story has limited possibilities.  And noticing that the characters live conveniently falls within the bounds of good story can feel inherently artificial because real life is not so tidy.

There's a subset of writers who can't change the setting and characters to harmonize with a good story, however: the writers of substantially accurate historical fiction.  They have to fill in the blanks in a historically likely manner, and they have to present all the events, known, probable, and invented, in a manner that will engage the reader.  Hollywood's notorious for not giving a tinker's dam whether they get anything even slightly right as long as it's an exciting story and most people won't notice or care about the inaccuracies; but the aim of at least some historical fiction is to try to give the reader a sense of what things might really have been like, as far as the writer can manage to figure it out.

That is similar in certain ways to what I end up doing.  The first rule I have is never, ever to contradict a model that has yielded a definite result.  Then I usually fill in places where I don't know what "really" happened with the most likely possibility.  Occasionally when one plausible choice is particularly good I favor it, and if another is particulary bad I avoid it.

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Second, the way authors generally harmonize story with character and setting is that during the process of writing and revision, they change the characters and setting to harmonize them with the needs of a good story.  This is not a luxury that a GM or players usually have in a role-playing game.  I have played revised scenes before, usually to correct a misunderstanding but at least once to correct a game-destroying sequence of events from happening.

The most common reason for me to revise something is realizing that I was wrong -- I had to make a choice I didn't manage to channel and later I realize it didn't work the way I said it did.  Mostly I can just note the change and amend the log, but after the first several sessions of my current campaign I realized there was something crucial about the setting I hadn't understood, and we replayed some scenes that had a significant effect on the characters' interactions.

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No.  I mean exactly what I asked, in the broad sense that I asked it.  Can the natural actions of the character produce a story (in the most general sense) that's not good?  If there can be good stories and bad stories, it follows that some sequences of events will make a good story and others will make a bad story.  Is it possible that the natural actions of a character can produce a story that's just not good by the standards of, say, good fiction?  I suspect, for example, that you don't even try to play certain sorts of characters because they will inevitably be boring.  Is there a point at which a character seems like they should produce an interesting story but, when played out with fidelity to setting and character, are also boring?
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Not all conflicts and not all resolutions are good stories, nor are they even satisfactory stories, by many standards.   For example, the way a character resolves a conflict may simply be boring.  Can't you imagine, for example, that some of the ways your character might cope with being undead might simply be boring as a story?  Or maybe during the first few scenes, the flow of events and being true to character leads to a character that destroys himself or rolls up into a catatonic ball that he refuses to leave.  OK.  The character has resolved their situation but is it a good story?


There's no question that characters can behave in ways that's actively detrimental to doing anything interesting -- there really are campaign-wrecking responses and I've yanked a character out of play before he even got into it to prevent one once.  It's just that being flexible about what story we're going to end up executing, and which characters will end up taking which roles, cuts down on the number of responses that I can't work with.

As far as boredom goes -- I've never been bored playing an immersible character, but there are things the character might do that are of little interest to anyone else.  If I'm GMing I try to pay enough attention to when we've hit that point to start summarizing there, although of course one of the hazards of immersion is inattention to OOC perspectives.  One of the sessions in my present campaign was wrong that way -- it was interesting to me and highly informative, in that I came to understand some of the character's previously inexplicable actions, but there was a point where it was time, not to change the character's actions, but to start summarizing rather than playing in detail.  That I didn't was simple faulty technique on my part.

Now about the undead character -- I could use either permanent catatonia or self-destruction as the primary plot of a short story, or as a subplot in a novel or a campaign.

If I get stuck on the idea that the story I'm going to tell starts at reanimation and moves chronologically forward from there, then I may think the character wrecked my story if he does either of those things.  The story I had in mind is wrecked, sure.  All possible stories, no.  The two possibilities that stop a forward-moving story dead leave a backward-moving one wide open: "How did he cope? -- He failed.  And why did he fail? -- This is who he once was, and this is what happened to him."  Self-destruction is stronger, being more decisive and active, but with sufficiently descriptive writing, either of these could be wrenching.

In fact, this character is providing a background subplot in my current campaign.  I was expecting a more-or-less catatonic reaction, with a slow awakening that proceeded over months as his magical state stabilized; obviously, that's the sort of thing I'd portray intermittently and mostly in summary until he did wake up enough to do something interesting that the PCs could find out about.

There's a natural plot this character could have lent himself to, that could have worked if the character had awakened the way I expected him to: a mystery plot about who and what has come to be attuned to the magical wellspring in the enchanted forest he crashed in.  I wasn't planning to run this anyway because the player knows too much about the character from other contexts, and that doesn't make for a good mystery; but if it weren't for that, I might well have run that -- except that the PC forestalled it.  

The PC saw the undead character's glider going down and surprised me by deciding to rescue the pilot, despite the fact that the undertaking involved definite risk and there were very bad odds that he survived the crash.  But she was willing to undertake it, and kept on being willing even after she discovered what she was rescuing.  So he ended up reaching intermittent semiconsciousness in a much more psychologically favorable circumstance than I expected -- friendly human contact -- which mitigated some of the reactions I would have guessed at otherwise.  (I can't actually be sure how he'd have reacted without playing it at least in my own mind.)

For 100% in-world reasons, I realized that given who he was, what he was doing, and the resources he had available, there had to be an enchanted equivalent of a flight recorder in the wreckage, and the PC recovered it.  She already had a fair idea of who he was and why he was up there; she got to watch the dramatically appalling results of failing to survive the use of a particularly dangerous form of magic the player is interested in the PC's possibly needing to employ in the future.  So the undead character and the events around him are suitable for setting up dramatic action in the PC's main plotline later.

If I had been intending to run the mystery plot and got too set on my original plans, maybe I'd be going around saying that the immersively-played PC wrecked my plot. Or if I were willing to interfere in the natural course of events more than I am, maybe I'd have tried to come up with some artificial obstacle to keep her from finding the revenant.  But with the approach I take in fact, I don't see that I have a problem.  Not being able to run one scenario forces me to set up another for the next leg of the campaign, but the worst ill effect I see coming from this is that I might have to take a break to figure out how to set up something else.

This character is turning out to be a recurring NPC, but as matters stand there isn't a plot I want to run involving him that primarily addresses the desires of the players and the PCs.  (There's a possible plot with those characteristics that I don't want to run because it's much likely to turn out badly for him than not, and I like the character.)  So he's in the background, serving to round out the setting and demonstrate that there's something going on in the world beside whatever the PCs' major attention is on at the moment.  


There's  another thing I'd like to get at, about RPG plots, constraints, and medium differences.

In writing groups that are likely to include roleplayers, invariably there are people who try to translate their campaigns into novels.  Invariably also there are people who proclaim that no one should ever attempt this because it can't be done right, in spite of commercially successful counterexamples by authors who have done just that.  The people who proclaim that it can't be done are probably throwing out the data from the successful translations because they don't recognize them for what they are: the marks of a naive attempt simply to write a campaign structure unchanged in a novel are painfully obvious; a skilled translation into a new medium with a very different expected audience doesn't end up leaving "This is my D&D campaign" bootmarks all over the text.

An experience I found most informative was reading an attempt at translation by someone who wrote serviceable prose, but who had not in any way recognized the structural differences between a campaign and a novel, which threw those differences into high relief for me.  So I found myself reading a work that had six characters given nearly equal weight in a single-stranded plotline involving periodic fights.  Aside from some pretty game-specific D&D tropes, it was like having neon signs reading "Keep the party together!" and "Balance spotlight time!" -- and I suspect it worked well enough as a campaign.  It didn't work as a novel, because the extra strictures a lot of people put on RPG sessions have nothing to do with telling a good story as such, and their naive importation into novel format gave it a fair amount of dramatic deadwood in the form of distractingly redundant characters.

A novel can have several main characters, but they don't share the same dramatic function.  You don't see novels with six characters differentiated primarily by their tactical abilities all having absolutely equal weight and attacking precisely the same problem from the same dramatic angle.  Rather, important novel characters fulfill different dramatic functions and at least some of them will be participating in different subplots.  You just don't see this idea that everyone must move in lockstep doing the same thing.  It's possible to get away with that in an RPG because in the RPG format the characters are also serving as viewpoint characters, playing pieces, or both: every player who sees the story through the eyes of a character sees through a different pair.  Which, of course, is not a method of differentiation that works in writing.

I'm not surprised that by the time someone adds the idea that to run a good session the characters must stay together and address the same problem to the idea that a good story is the one planned in advance, they've got a recipe for running a campaign that feels as free and natural as a straitjacket.

I never accepted some common ideas about roleplaying, in part because the first thing I did that much resembled roleplaying wasn't D&D.  I joined a collaborative storytelling forum, where the owner made up a fantasy tavern and the rest of us introduced characters.  It looked rather like freeform message-based roleplaying in some respects, but it had no particular connection either to freeform RP subculture or to tabletop subculture, with the result that we simply didn't import either set of ideas about The Right Way to Play.  We ended up with a set of procedures that worked out to:
  • The setting is fantasy.
  • You control your own character.
  • Get together with the writers of the characters you're involved with to work things out.  (We'd often get together in chat if a scene had a lot of dialogue, to speed up the exchanges.)

It didn't produce great literature, but we had fun with it.  And as a result I know for certain, by experience and counterexample, that some of the ideas floating around as to the only right way to handle the group construction of fiction are unnecessary restrictions.

  • The story will not necessarily turn into a preposterous display of self-centered egotism if the guy who owns the setting also plays an important character as his own.
  • You do not necessarily need game rules to keep from degenerating into "Bang!  You're dead!"  "No, I'm not!"
  • It will not necessarily wreck the story if some of the characters find separate things to do.
  • It is a sign of vanity and immaturity to write any story but one about a character who starts weak and slowly struggles to accumulate power.

The thing that caused me to move to the RPG format is that I wanted to do some tactical simulation (but I never succeeded in doing that satisfactorily online in chat until recently); and I wanted more consistency in the setting, and better integration between characters and setting, than you see in the freeform format, where no one is playing Editor in Chief of the World.  But when I started playing RPGs, I didn't take up all the common ideas above, and my baseline idea of what you can do to tell a collaborative story is less restrictive because of it.

There's only one more of these things coming.

Keran

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Game; Story
« Reply #199 on: October 15, 2006, 03:35:35 AM »
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Maybe you are simply better at anticipating how characters will turn out than I am.  Heck, I had one character start acting crazy after what I, as the player, thought would be a fairly mundane wipe of part of their memory to evade police truth detection.  It turned out that the wiped out bits of memory were incredibly important to the character's relationship with a PC and NPC and I didn't even understand that until I psychoanalyzed the character to understand why they went all paranoid on me.

I've certainly done things like that, and I wouldn't say I have a good record of predicting them, either.  Only in a recent session did I come to understand why I had a sense that the revenant wasn't going to do something he normally would definitely have done.  I couldn't figure out what was going on from an OOC perspective, and only when we played through the relevant scenes did the reason become apparent.  After awakening he's traumatic amnesia, some magical interference, and a bit of minor brain damage, and until I saw in detail how they were working together I couldn't explain why I sensed that he wasn't going to try to contact his former associates when his attitudes about friendship and loyalty are unchanged.

Actually, I tend to be bored with any character I can predict too well because that means the story has no real decision points.  I dislike playing in any story where the character's necessary and expected actions are too predictable and constricted in part for same reason that I put down The Wheel of Time: it was obvious to me by page 50 of the first book that Rand was going to turn out to be the Dragon Reborn.  A good story has events that seem explicable after the fact, but not inevitable before.  If I don't have some sense that some pivotal things might have gone otherwise at least while I'm reading or watching, then I'm likely to think the story is bad.

There are stories where the interest is not whether, but how, the main character is going to solve the problem.  But this seems to be a comparatively uncommon approach in RPGs: most of the material I've read over the years involving preplotting for dramatic effect seems to involve creating illusionary suspense about Whether, rather than real suspense about How: the latter isn't on the radar.  It doesn't really surprise me that amateur storytellers working in a medium where they can't revise and edit often end up producing effects that seriously annoy a significant percentage of players, even if those players accept similar things in other media.  The GM is trying to do something that's not necessarily easy to do well with both hands free, in a medium where they have one hand tied behind their back.

The thing that sets my teeth on edge about dramatic plotting in RPGs is that it often not only is an attempt to make crucial things, the decisions taken at pivot points, inevitable in fact, but it has a large tendency to make them subjectively feel inevitable for me.  Which is a certain storykiller.

That said -- this is one of the places where the Threefold contains implicit assumptions that don't work particularly well for me.  The baseline assumption about simulationism is that it's like running an initial-condition simulation: one starts with known conditions and then proceeds from there in chronolgical order according to cause-and-effect.  But it doesn't necessarily work that way for me.  When my immersible characters form they tend to pull worlds into existence around them, and there is some concept of a character present and a character past; but I may also know for certain, or apprehend as highly likely, a few things that are in the character's future.  So sometimes I have a reason for not being terribly concerned about a possibility that otherwise might be on the table. I might not know why a thing will or won't happen, but occasionally I know whether it will.  I'd be bored indeed if this effect ever pruned all the character's major decisions down so that their pathway was predictable, but nothing close has ever happened.

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I tend to consider writing for the enjoyment of writing to be a very different thing than writing for publication or others.  And I think that if we start talking about "good stories" and "bad stories", broad appeal comes into play.  While it doesn't naturally follow that "good stories" are directly tied to "commercial success", I think you can learn some things about what most people think are good or bad in stories from looking at the mainstream and commercial successes.

If you define 'good story' as something that has mainstream commercial potential and stick to it absolutely -- well, I always end up saying good for whom? both on a practical level, and because some modern stuff that impresses me as tripe has more commercial potential now than some of the great works of the past.  Culture changes and what most people can easily relate to changes too.

So practically speaking, when I set out to tell a story, I set out to make it the best example of that kind of work that I can produce.  But I don't always aim at the most popular sort of work -- obviously, or I wouldn't be trying to write a story in blank pentameter, which is commercial suicide.

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Well, writing about something different than what first interested you in the character is entirely possible if you just make it up as you go and let the characters run wild.  While writing, not finishing the story is always an option.  Revision is also an option.  But how does that translate into a role-playing game?  Depending on intwined your character is with other characters in the game, it can be very disruptive if you just stop running that character.

I've never run out of interest in an immersible character -- if I stop playing one of them, it's always been something else that sidelined me.  I've dropped characters whose heads I couldn't get into partly for lack of interest, but since I couldn't get into their heads they were dramatic ciphers and not carrying any significant part of the story anyway.

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Step back a step from the idea of adjusting the character to fit a particular plot.

What I'm talking about is that you've created a good character and given them a conflict that you think will be interesting to explore and anticipate will produce a good story, no matter how it turns out.  You set up the initial conditions and then start writing, keeping everything true to setting and character.  During the course of that writing, you realize that the way the character is going to deal with the situation looks an awful lot of like a cliche that you've seen in dozens of movies, something you hadn't anticipated.  So you've got your character, your conflict, your setting, and a resolution that's cliched and not very insightful or interesting because you've seen something similar dozens of times before.  So what do you change?  Or do you just start writing something entirely different?

There are only so many basic plot structures and only so many sane ways to solve a lot of problems, so I don't necessarily need to have a plot that no one has ever seen the likes of; what I need is an interesting treatment of the problem.  I assume by 'cliche' not merely that the events are similar to common patterns but that my treatment has also been common enough to be uninteresting.  Which, if I'm going to finish the story, is not tolerable unless this is some kind of an experimental work.  (I've written  really bad stuff through to the end trying to see if a particular procedure would be helpful.)

Thing is, I don't tend to produce cliches as a result of exploration -- I suppose I might some time, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.  I produce cliches and absurd melodrama when I set out to do conscious dramatic plotting.  And the other thing is, what tends to get me interested in a character is that I don't think that whatever conflict comes with the concept is generally treated well -- maybe it's mostly ignored, or maybe I think the common approach is missing important angles.  So I don't have any great tendency to end up in Clicheville when I go exploring.

Now if it did happen, I might simply drop the story, if I didn't have a strong motive for wanting to write this particular one.  If no part of it is "real" I might revise anything; but odds are if I started writing a story this way that some part of it is -- most likely, at least a couple of the characters and perhaps the general construction of the situation.  I am much less likely to know all the specifics of the situation; and it might be that there's something that, butterfly-effect-wise, I can tweak to produce a more interesting answer -- if either A or B is a possible circumstance and A turned out to yield results that are a crashing bore, maybe I'll go with B.  I might attempt to see if it'd be interesting if I wrote it in a different format, stepped out of chronological order, altered the viewpoint character, or if I used a different character as protagonist -- sometimes the same series of events yields multiple possible choices of main character.

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Have other people read the story?  Do they feel the same way about it that you do?  I'm asking because some of your comments seem like maybe you are too close to your own story to see it's merits and flaws objectively.  Maybe things that seem hollow to you won't seem hollow to a reader who doesn't know how it will end?

People have read it as far as it goes, in its various versions.  The present version has largely positive reviews.  Nobody but me is complaining about the scene I can't make work, since I haven't been able to write a version of it that I've been willing to let see daylight.

When I think I've written a scene I throw it in the drawer for a few days and then take it out to see if it works; if it doesn't, I try new approaches until either I do get something that works, or until I realize that I have no bloody idea how to fix it, and throw the entire story in the drawer until an idea turns up.  When I finally figure out why the scene isn't working and what I might do about it, I have another crack at it.

It's  hard for me to analyze how well the story is flowing overall because by the time I have a scene working it sticks persistently in my brain, so taking a fresh look is difficult.  I'm probably going to let a couple of years pass between finishing the first draft and the second, for that reason.

Every version of the next scene I've tried so far feels wrong, and as I think about it, that's probably because they're mischaracterizations.  The work is stylized rather than prosaic, so it fits to have the characters speaking in a fashion that deviates from the way they actually speak day to day.  However, it still should be the case that even stylized and poetic speech conveys what the character really is like.  It's seeming more and more likely to me that I cannot put a clear dramatic statement of emotion in the mouth of Master Uncommunicative, even if it's plain that some of the depiction is literary convention.  The biggest reason I can't do it is that the character is coping with strong fear by refusing to articulate it even to himself.  I think I'm going to have to write one of those scenes where we see what the state of affairs is by what the character will not say, or some other indirect approach.

... That's way too long, and as clear as I know how to make it.