TheRPGSite

I promised to think.
Thunk I have.

Results:

Story has become a loaded word in internet discourse. The ways it has been loaded up from different sides shall be assumed as being known. I for one, have been guilty of loading it up with a negative connotation.
I equalled it with railroading, onanistic playstyle, player rape, method acting and all kinds of similar stuff I think of very lowly.

Are those connotations making sense? Do they really capture something?
Does the use of the word in it`s current guise help discourse?

First, let me tell you that I am of the uttermost and sternest belief, that there is a cultural divide in the hobby. Actually, there are even more cleavages, but for simplicity I will assume there is only one big one.

Story is supposed to either relate or be disconnected from the RPG hobby.

This is the argument, at it`s barest bones.

The first problem arises from the definition of Roleplaying Games, people all over the 'Net confuse a lot of stuff there.

Roleplaying is a method, call it technique, if you like. It shall be hereby defined as:

Extrapolation of virtual situations through verbal negotiation.

What`s a roleplaying game then? Anytime, the method of roleplay is used for leisure, i.g. in a game

It`s easy to show, that the first instances of roleplay use  were of a certain ilk, played by certain people in a specific context. Namely miniature wargamers with an interest in fantasy/sf. They created D&D, and thereby Adventure Gaming as we know it.

So, as RPGs existed only in the guise of Adventure Games for quite some time, they becams synonymous.

Wait! Where does the Role enter?, you might say.
I say, to negotiate virtual situations it is very convenient, to assign different particiators different roles. these can be parties, countries, military units, cliques, any other group, or individuals. As we have seen, RPGs became prominent through D&D, which main revolutions were:

- focus on individual fantasy playing piece
- facilitating the method of roleplay for some parts of the game

Thusly, the

Roleplay == play/portrayal of individual character

is a fallacy stemming from history. That`s why I talk about role assumption, when others talk about roleplay. Nobody will change this, as the word Roleplay itself easily lends to this assumption. Thereby, we should stick to Method of Roleplay when we want to reference it.

Can the MoR be used for other stuff besides fantasy adventure gaming? Sure! It has been and will be used way more often in education and planning or even therapy, than for leisure activities. That`s why we have to differentiate it from role assumption commonly referred to just as roleplay.

Now we know what an RPG is, let`s look at story:

Story is a big word, with a well understood place in english language, as well as a wide range of meaning.


Which is the meaning I am so against to have in my games. Easy, it`s the dramatic element.

When someone says, he likes to create a story with his game, then I assume he does not mean just "narrative".
A narrative can be formed with RPGs and as a matter of fact everytime the MoR is used for anything, well everything that happens can be made into a narrative.
Thusly, we can renounce the possibility that the person in question is meaning story after the aforementioned "weak" point of view.

What does he mean, when saying story?

Well actually nobody knows. If anybody knew, there wouldn`t have been so much trainwreck discussions, and even worse trainwreck games, especiall by people who all wanted story.

So, which kind of story do I want to keep out of my game?
Easy, remember, the dramatic type. This is to say, there are a lot of people, who, for historical reasons have encountered the MoR in the guise of Adventure Games, while not coming from a tradition of wargaming. Some of them even come from a background of comic books, fantasy novels and TV-Shows. And some of them don`t want or cannot get into the wargaming mindset. Some of them want to recreate the drama from comic books and TV-Shows and Blockbuster Movies. Of course they can use RPGs for it, as RPGs have the MoR in them, one of the most powerful methods humans have for emulating something. So they go out, and recreate the dramatic strucure of their idols. And this is where any regular (war-)game element comes to a screeching halt. Either you emulate dramatic structures, or you have freedom of participants actions, both do not go together. This shift in aims is responsible for most, if not all conflicts in gaming and has divided the RPG hobby into distinct hobbies, but not in a harsh and clear cut manner, but in a hazy and fudgy sort of way.

In conclusion, I can say:

- story as a word is too broad to convey precise meaning
- the actual implied meaning has to be guessed
- most of the time story implies "having dramatic structure"
- the precise kind of dramatic structure is even then unknown
- whatever you do with the MoR as long as you use it as a leisure activity,  
   you are playing RPGs

Harking back to my initial questions:

Are those connotations making sense?

Yes.

Do they really capture something?

Yes.

Does the use of the word in it`s current guise help discourse?

No.

Quote from: SettembriniRoleplaying is a method, call it technique, if you like. It shall be hereby defined as:

Extrapolation of virtual situations through verbal negotiation.

I am a bear of very little brain, and large words bother me.  Can you say that any more simply, or is this the most you can simplify it without losing its meaning and precision?

Quote from: SettembriniEither you emulate dramatic structures, or you have freedom of participants actions, both do not go together.

Oooh!  That's a bold assertion there.  Do you know it to be bold (and controversial)?  Or are you trying to say something that is obvious to you and might well be obvious to me, if I understood your intent more clearly?

QuoteI am a bear of very little brain, and large words bother me. Can you say that any more simply, or is this the most you can simplify it without losing its meaning and precision?

Ahh, no. Everybody does it, nothing special.

MoR equals

People talk to each other to resolve what will happen next in a make-believe situation.

Like, when the Player says:
Player:"I listen at the door"
GM: "You hear nothing"
Player:"I put a glass on the door and listen again"
GM: "You hear chinese voices."

QuoteOooh!  That's a bold assertion there.  Do you know it to be bold (and controversial)?  

I know it`s controversial, but I think it`s true. Reality allows for hybrids and shades of grey, though. Still, it`s an axis of exchange.

With "axis of exchange," I think you've really hit the nail on the head.  Absolute freedom is sacrificed for plot and vice versa.  This axis allows for a look at how a game is played without appeals to some sort of Platonic RPG that will solve all our problems.

Settembrini, you've illustrated the "story" better than I've ever seen.  Well done.

Quote from: SettembriniPeople talk to each other to resolve what will happen next in a make-believe situation.

So ... like ... Diplomacy?

Quote from: SettembriniI know it`s controversial, but I think it`s true. Reality allows for hybrids and shades of grey, though. Still, it`s an axis of exchange.

I suppose it depends on how you're thinking of it.  A game can, for instance, allow you to do most anything, but strongly reward you for doing certain things.  That looks (to me) like it supports both freedom and guidance.  So the "axis of exchange" rings a bit hollow for me ... but, like I said, that may be because I'm misreading what you mean by it.

Verbal? French-maid-role-playing laughs at your paltry communication efforts!

O RLY? (http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/maidrpg/maidrpg.htm)

Quote from: Settembrinicleavages

:boobies:     :boobs:

I failed my will roll.

Quote from: SettembriniReality allows for hybrids and shades of grey, though. Still, it`s an axis of exchange.

Settembrini, I really think you are on to something in this thread.    The end result that I want from games is strongly influenced by those "storied" sources you mentioned, comic books and space operas in particular.   However, I get the most pleasure out of achieving those ends via the tried and true methods of adventure gaming.  I think that's a lengthy and arduous process only acheivable by regular campaign play.  Because in the grognard approach you should fail to be awesome at least as often as you succeed.  The story game people want to catapult over that process and get straight to the cool, but the price they seem to pay is a lot of tiny, super-focused games that only support a few hours of play.

BTW, I did not have a wargaming background, unless you want to count a little messing around with chess before I discovered D&D.  Yet I highly value the wargamey parts of roleplaying.  This leads me to suspect that either sometimes you over-value having grognard chops to play D&D the grognardy way or else Tom Moldvay and Gary Gygax knew what they were doing when they wrote the '81 Basic Rules and the DMG.  Those two texts are the Genesis and Exodus of my own personal relationship to the hobby.

Quote from: SettembriniI promised to think.
Thunk I have

....

Does the use of the word in it`s current guise help discourse?

No.

Story is a useful word because it's probably the way most of the world would express a common goal of role-playing gaming: that is, to produce an enjoyable fiction with certain literary elements.

I think a lot of people want a "decent story" from their games -- and I'm not just talking about White Wolf players. I'm talking about a sizable number of D&D players who want:

1) Interesting characters who are consistent and well drawn
2) A sequence of events that is meaningful in some identifiably human way (e.g. important beyond the win/lose conditions of a war game)
3) Reasonably standard structure (action rises to climax, climax occurs, coda follows)

There are a lot of people who want this stuff from their RPGs -- maybe as a secondary priority, but still as an important one.

RPG's -- most of them, anyway -- are pretty good at delivering this.

If you leave "story" out of the discussion, you're not able to elegantly or clearly talk about about stuff that's important to a significant audience.

And I think Story is mainly problematic as a result of other issues:

All kinds of problems can happen in pursuit of "story" -- especially if it's pursued clumsily, with little skill, or without respect for other people around the table (e.g. railroading, or simply failure to develop interesting NPC's and initial conditions).

Story can *also* be problematic if the players want a finished (in the sense of "polished") product. RPGs happen in real-time, without editing. Further, in most games, not everyone has all the information (the GM traditionallly knows more than the players).

This means that the "story" is likely to be less polished than somethign that would appear in other media. For most folks, that's a feature, not a bug (I find RPGs more immersive in some ways because of this, than most books or movies).

I think you're wrong that "creating story" is somehow in conflict with freedom of action. That's no more true in RPG's than it is in books or movies -- there are a lot of well known techniques for creating recognizable stories that involve no railroading or pre-determined plot.

Summary:

1) Use the term "story," but accept that people may have negative connotations or slightly different definitions.

2) Look at the problems with story as GM skill issue, rather than an innate conflict

Cheers,
-E.

I'm liking this discussion, especially the initial post by Settembrini, and the last post by E.  

Not ready to weigh in yet.

Once again we flirt with disaster by not having a solid definition of "story" to work from.  

Others have remarked that a recounting of game events in narrative form can happen with any game, not just those in which a fictional role is assumed by the players. ("Then Texas, using artful cunning and its connection with the fell gods of yore, drove the nails into Oklahoma's coffin with its next drive.")  Can it be said that there are football players for whom story is a major component of play?

More importantly, what the fuck does story mean in the context of a game wherein any of the players can up stumps and wreck any plot, rising action, denouement or climax they could build to/experience?

Most importantly, do the different sides in this issue have anything to say to each other?  I would put forward that the basic assumptions that each group works from are so different that they will forever talk past each other.

"If you do C, then you must restrict the presence of F."

"Wrong.  You can do M all day without restricting B."

Arguments ensue wherein neither side can communicate with the other.  Language, experience and the very matter of what an RPG is to each group all come into conflict, allowing for no common points of conversation.

In these arguments it's not that we're shifting the goalposts, it's that we're not even on the same fucking field.

Wow. I must confess, seeing your name attached as thread starter, Settembrini, I expected something a lot less...thoughtful, (EDITTED IN: Particularly in regards to the meeting of 'story' and 'game'). I am more than pleasantly surprised.

Not only is this one of the most sensible and reasonable things I've seen you post - though I admit to not following your posting history closely - it's one of the better things on story in RPGs that I recall ever reading.

Big agreement on the 'axis of exchange'. Not to harp too much on a popular choice, but DitV is generally regarded to generate dramatic, issue-laden story. It gets a great deal of praise for this. But there is a point where the mechanics tell you that you may not decided to keep talking about the issue; you are forced to escalate to physical interaction or surrender your point. Sure, 'physical' can be a hug, as is often pointed out, so you still have some freedom of choice; however, that's too far along the dramatic structure side of the axis for me.

Additionally, one hell of a followup by E., and I'm interested in Tony's weighing in on this; I rarely agree with you, Tony, but you make some solid points with great frequency.

QuoteSo ... like ... Diplomacy?

Yes and No. The boardgame uses MoR during negotiation, but uses a regular rules system to see what really happens next. People with a Diplomacy history will know that many a gam degenerates into moves only under certain circumstances. Still with the many Tolkien fans in early diplomacy play by mail scene, this is a very important line of tradition for RPGs.

QuoteBTW, I did not have a wargaming background,

Of course, but you took most of the trapppings of the wargame mindset and incorporated them into your vision of the game, I'd say. And sure, Gary and Moldvay did stuff the wargamey way. My point is not: Only Grognards do it right. I say: Those Veteran Mini-Pushers wrote the text, thereby you have to play like them, or definitely change the aim of what you are doing. This started to happen very early, as can be seen in the games being published. Quite understandably, as the themes of adventure games are the themes covered by story media. It`s a built-in clash of aims.

QuoteStory is a useful word because it's probably the way most of the world would express a common goal of role-playing gaming: that is, to produce an enjoyable fiction with certain literary elements.

just because you say it, it doesn't make it any more true.

but:

Quote1) Interesting characters who are consistent and well drawn
2) A sequence of events that is meaningful in some identifiably human way (e.g. important beyond the win/lose conditions of a war game)
3) Reasonably standard structure (action rises to climax, climax occurs, coda follows)

already is a definition of what you mean by story. Thus, you move around the foremost reason for abandoning the word as useless for debate: You define it for your case!
And then I'm with you. There are people looking and getting this out of RPGs. Which works well, because with the penultimate weapon, the MoR, you can do any cool or stinkin'  shit you want.

QuoteRPG's -- most of them, anyway -- are pretty good at delivering this.

No, the MoR is. RPGs happen to use it a lot, but traditionally for other stuff than that.

QuoteSummary:

1) Use the term "story," but accept that people may have negative connotations or slightly different definitions.

2) Look at the problems with story as GM skill issue, rather than an innate conflict

@1) I`m with you. I still think a word which needs to be defined before further talking about it has basically lost it`s power as a shorthand though

@2) That`s wrong. See, the conflict is there, no matter who has to bear the brunt of the clash of aims. In your model the GM has to bear it. Okay, happens a lot, but this doesn't make the underlying lines of conflict go away.

Quote from: SettembriniYes and No. The boardgame uses MoR during negotiation, but uses a regular rules system to see what really happens next. People with a Diplomacy history will know that many a gam degenerates into moves only under certain circumstances.

But that's still people talking to each other in order to resolve what will happen next in a make-believe situation, isn't it?

Does it matter to their definition whether they're talking in a way that's structured by mechanical rules?

I don't see how accepting that Diplomacy incorporates elements of (proto)roleplay has any effect on Settembrini's thesis. Actually, any game falls under a broad version of Settembrini's definition of "roleplaying game" whenever the participants view the game as portraying imaginary events.

If I'm wrong about that then Sett needs a little more precision, particularly when it comes to "negotiate". Is it a reference to the fact that RPGs aren't formal games? (By which I mean that the rules to RPGs almost always have some wiggle room.) Or does it refer to the fact that RPGs are frameworks for figuring out "what happens next"?

Quote from: Elliot WilenActually, any game falls under a broad version of Settembrini's definition of "roleplaying game" whenever the participants view the game as portraying imaginary events.

And when they talk.  A quiet game of chess, for instance, cannot be construed as fitting the definition.

I'm totally fine with that, if that's the intent.  Like you, I just want to make sure that the definition is saying what Settembrini means it to say.

QuoteActually, any game falls under a broad version of Settembrini's definition of "roleplaying game" whenever the participants view the game as portraying imaginary events.

I'm not saying Diplomacy is an RPG. I`m saying it

- uses a board
- uses military units
- uses MoR

It`s a game, that`s for sure, so technically you can call it RPG, as well as wargame as well as boardgame. But RPG is not really a technical term, it`s a organic grown term, that happens to mean something specific. And then, Diplomacy surely is not an RPG. In short, Anything derived from D&D qualifies as RPG.

The MoR is not dependant on rules. Basically, MoR is strongest, when pure negotiations without rules are implemented. This doesn`t mean RPGs should be rules light to be "real". RPGs are a historical ilk of games, whose aim is not:  

"using an facilitating the MoR".

but it has it`s own goals and ends, to which the MoR is just a means.

That`s why you can have all kinds of Games which use th MoR, all claiming to be RPGs, when actually the only thing in commion they have is a specific kind of resolution mechanism, namely verbal negotiation.

Quote from: SettembriniOf course, but you took most of the trapppings of the wargame mindset and incorporated them into your vision of the game, I'd say. And sure, Gary and Moldvay did stuff the wargamey way. My point is not: Only Grognards do it right. I say: Those Veteran Mini-Pushers wrote the text, thereby you have to play like them, or definitely change the aim of what you are doing. This started to happen very early, as can be seen in the games being published. Quite understandably, as the themes of adventure games are the themes covered by story media. It`s a built-in clash of aims.

... I'm not sure I follow your argument here. RPG-ing has its historical roots in wargames.

So what?

RPG's are basically games of pretend with a very limited but important framework -- a "system."

Let's Pretend is a pretty versitile thing. I can pretend to be a general guiding troops across a theater of war. I can then pretend to be one of those troops and tell the story of his victory or tragedy. I can do both in the same sitting.

Any clash of aims doesn't come from the activity -- it comes from the players.

A point you touch on below:

Quote from: Settembrinialready is a definition of what you mean by story. Thus, you move around the foremost reason for abandoning the word as useless for debate: You define it for your case!
And then I'm with you. There are people looking and getting this out of RPGs. Which works well, because with the penultimate weapon, the MoR, you can do any cool or stinkin'  shit you want.

The word isn't "useless for debate" because one needs to define it. In classic forensics (in the debate term) it's expected that the debators will define any emotionally-charged "evaluative" terms.

Apparently "story" is one of these... but it's a *key* one.

If the purpose of discussion is to convince or explorer an issue, defining charged terms is a pretty key part of that.

Quote from: SettembriniNo, the MoR is. RPGs happen to use it a lot, but traditionally for other stuff than that.

@1) I`m with you. I still think a word which needs to be defined before further talking about it has basically lost it`s power as a shorthand though

@2) That`s wrong. See, the conflict is there, no matter who has to bear the brunt of the clash of aims. In your model the GM has to bear it. Okay, happens a lot, but this doesn't make the underlying lines of conflict go away.

... I don't think there's a conflict; in my model the aim of creating a story simply isn't problematic. It requires some skill -- mostly on the part of the GM -- and it requires that everyone get along (basic respect at the table), but of course these things would be required in any event.

Maybe we should talk about my model and where you see the conflict. I'll say it again:

Story -- in *any* commonly understood sense -- it a natural product of traditional RPG gaming. It's one element of RPG gaming players commonly enjoy.

The idea that there's some conflict there (e.g. that producing a story requires either meta-game input from the players or railroading from the GM) isn't correct; those conclusions are either the result of unskilled GMing or a desire for a highly "finsihed" work of the sort that's not going to occur in improvised media (e.g. Improv theater, RPGs, etc.)

Rather than worrying over-much about the definition of "story" or creating new terms, I recommend looking at your assumptions:

*why* is there a conflict?
*what* is the nature of the conflict?

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: fonkaygarryOnce again we flirt with disaster by not having a solid definition of "story" to work from.  

Others have remarked that a recounting of game events in narrative form can happen with any game, not just those in which a fictional role is assumed by the players. ("Then Texas, using artful cunning and its connection with the fell gods of yore, drove the nails into Oklahoma's coffin with its next drive.")  Can it be said that there are football players for whom story is a major component of play?

More importantly, what the fuck does story mean in the context of a game wherein any of the players can up stumps and wreck any plot, rising action, denouement or climax they could build to/experience?

Most importantly, do the different sides in this issue have anything to say to each other?  I would put forward that the basic assumptions that each group works from are so different that they will forever talk past each other.

"If you do C, then you must restrict the presence of F."

"Wrong.  You can do M all day without restricting B."

Arguments ensue wherein neither side can communicate with the other.  Language, experience and the very matter of what an RPG is to each group all come into conflict, allowing for no common points of conversation.

In these arguments it's not that we're shifting the goalposts, it's that we're not even on the same fucking field.

You might be right: there might be so little common ground that discussion is impossible.

But I don't think that's the case. I think there are some embedded assumptions that aren't being looked at. Absent those assumptions, I think discussion becomes easy.

One *huge* and common assumption is that getting a story requires some degree of railroading (I don't know if anyone in this thread believes this; I've seen it assumed elsewhere. Commonly).

I don't think this is the case at all. I think that railroading is an *ineffective* way to create a good story -- but it happens when you've got a lousy or inexperienced, or lazy Game Master.

True: railroading will allow to produce a *certain* story -- but there's a universe of difference between saying "RPGs are good at creating stories" and "RPGs can be reliably used to create a specific, pre-defined story."

If everyone in the discussion is quietly adding the clause, "specific, pre-defined" then yeah -- it's going to be hard to talk about, and anyone saying "RPG's are good at creating stories" is going to sound odd (that would be me).

Another example of an embedded assumption: people (in other places, again, not sure it's happening here) assume that if players have the freedom to disrupt a game, then games may be bad at creating a story.

Maybe you're touching on it when you ask

Quote from: fonkaygarryMore importantly, what the fuck does story mean in the context of a game wherein any of the players can up stumps and wreck any plot, rising action, denouement or climax they could build to/experience?

For me the answer is simple: sure, there's a chance of blowing things and getting a story that's not good in some traditional way (E.g. a huge anti-climax). That's not a problem unless it happens so often that I'm not meeting my game priority of "get a good story out of this experience."

The risk, for me, actually makes the story more compelling. The good guys really *might* lose. The hero really *might* fail. If he succeeds in the end, it means more than it would if an author or director simply made it so. The issue here is skill at managing the risks, just like it would be in any collaboration.

Why is it a key element for you? Do you see those risks as unmanagable? Or is it something more fundamental: does the freedom to bollox things make RPG's "bad at creating stories?"

Cheers,
-E.

QuoteThat's not a problem unless it happens so often that I'm not meeting my game priority of "get a good story out of this experience."

There are many people who don´t want to get a story out of this experience.
There are people who want to do stuff as their characters.
There are people who give a shit about dramatic structures.
There are people who want to solve the challenge with as less risk as possible.
Anti Climax is already assuming that a climax is a good thing unto itself.

It is not.

Quote from: SettembriniThere are many people who don´t want to get a story out of this experience.
There are people who want to do stuff as their characters.
There are people who give a shit about dramatic structures.
There are people who want to solve the challenge with as less risk as possible.
Anti Climax is already assuming that a climax is a good thing unto itself.

It is not.

Sure. I'm not claiming that desire for some kind of story is any kind of universal priority.

But I think it's a *common* one -- otherwise, why would there be so much "heat" around the issue?

It's also not mutually exclusive to doing stuff in character. In fact, I think those two agendas often go together very well:

I want to just "play my guy" -- not worry *at all* about the story structure of the game or whatever -- but I still want the sequence of events to be interesting as a story.

I'm not asking for anything traditional games don't excel at delivering. And I doubt that games that address these priorities in their marketing text would be as popular as they are if lots of other people didn't share those priorities.

Interestingly: I think trying to take care of those priorities with game-system is not a solution. I find games that *don't* exalt their "story-telling" mechanics to be much better at telling stories than games that claim to be all about creating narrative fiction. Give me AD&D over the latest story-telling darling anyday.

Cheers,
-E.

QuoteInterestingly: I think trying to take care of those priorities with game-system is not a solution. I find games that *don't* exalt their "story-telling" mechanics to be much better at telling stories than games that claim to be all about creating narrative fiction. Give me AD&D over the latest story-telling darling anyday.

I'm partially with you there. The MoR is really all you need, for whatever you want. Still, you need to have all players in the same boat, at least they have to respect each others aims.
And this is all you need, decent guys and gals whcih whom "negotiating" stuff works. It comes all down to how well the actual people go together in the context of the game. No magic pixie dust in forms of "drama-mechanics" will help.
But: When you get together, and everybody says he wants to experience a great story, those can be totally different things. And thusly I renounce the value of the word in the gaming discourse. Define and elaborate, elsewise it`s meaningless.

Quote from: SettembriniI'm partially with you there. The MoR is really all you need, for whatever you want. Still, you need to have all players in the same boat, at least they have to respect each others aims.
And this is all you need, decent guys and gals whcih whom "negotiating" stuff works. It comes all down to how well the actual people go together in the context of the game. No magic pixie dust in forms of "drama-mechanics" will help.
But: When you get together, and everybody says he wants to experience a great story, those can be totally different things. And thusly I renounce the value of the word in the gaming discourse. Define and elaborate, elsewise it`s meaningless.

I think we are as one, as a friend of mine says.

I guess I'm choosing "define and elaborate" as my approach. I think we differ on the utility of this -- I get the impression you think a different set of terms might be less trouble in the long run...

But given how pervasive and intuitive story is, and how difficult effective jargon is to create, I think we're stuck with story for the time being.

Fortunately, it's not hard to come up with a workable definition that gets past the ambiguity and allows real discussion to take place.

Cheers,
-E.

QuoteBut given how pervasive and intuitive story is, and how difficult effective jargon is to create, I think we're stuck with story for the time being.

No, I`m against jargon-creep. It`s enough if people are aware that they need to further define what they are talking about. But it is definitely not enough to just talk about "story" in a general way.

Real world words usually help, sometimes a "big" word is needed for precision, but all in all jargon for RPGs has proven to actively hinder communication instead of furthering it.

Oh well, and keep in mind people are little inconsequential suckers!

What they say might not what they actually want. Or they don`t want it to the last consequence!

For example, some people might say they want drama, but still want total freedom! It`s not games, but people who have dysfunctional longings and traits. Oftentimes in themselves!
That`s were "decetn guys and gals" comes into play again...

[another example...there are players, whom I know, who want to excel at D&D combat. And they want to earn their stuff. but sometimes they (or he) is cheating with dice rolls! And afterwards he regrets it, but it comes up several times, i.g. he does it again...well people can just be like this]

Quote from: -E.Maybe we should talk about my model and where you see the conflict. I'll say it again:

Story -- in *any* commonly understood sense -- it a natural product of traditional RPG gaming. It's one element of RPG gaming players commonly enjoy.

The idea that there's some conflict there (e.g. that producing a story requires either meta-game input from the players or railroading from the GM) isn't correct; those conclusions are either the result of unskilled GMing or a desire for a highly "finsihed" work of the sort that's not going to occur in improvised media (e.g. Improv theater, RPGs, etc.)

Rather than worrying over-much about the definition of "story" or creating new terms, I recommend looking at your assumptions:

*why* is there a conflict?
*what* is the nature of the conflict?

Cheers,
-E.

The problem is that it sounds like your definition of "story" is utterly nothing like what either the Forgeites or most normal RPGers are defining story as.

You seem to be choosing to define story as "absolutely whatever happens in the RPG IS story because the characters are acting out their personas, and so "story" is something utterly spontaneous that happens in the roleplaying".

And yes, by that utterly loose and pointless definition, there is no conflict between story-making and RPGs. But that's only because you've chosen to define story as basically being "story=roleplaying".

Which is a little like saying "Hey guys, don't worry, there's no conflict between Judaism and Islam because according to me, anyone who is worshipping the monotheistic god of the desert people is a Muslim!". A neat little dodge, but on the practical level it solves fuck all, because no one is using that definition.

There is still, behind everything, the question of the goals.  If you are trying to create a story that you want to go a certain way, either in the sense of having a fixed beginning-end run, or in the sense that the players, or certain npcs, or parts of the setting should have some kind of "protection" against tampering so that their "protagonism" be maintained, or you want certain things to happen in certain times in a certain way and that's vital to the end result you want; basically if you have a fixed end result in mind, period, then you will run into the brick wall of the fact that RPGs aren't made to work that way. At that point, you must choose between forcing the game to work that way, or being frustrated with gaming as a whole.

Using your definition, it wouldn't be a problem, because absolutely anything that any RPG ever did ever would be "story", so there wouldn't be any conflict between someone wanting to tell a story a certain way and someone wanting to actually play the RPG.  But by your definition it would mean that the "story" that three aspergers-inflicted diaper-wearers living in mom's basement made in their game of "Teh Ultimate Dungeon!!" would be in no way qualitatively different than the "story" three clove-cigarette smoking Chomsky-quoting intellectualoids living in their mother's basement made in their game of "My Life With Master".
And as much as that thought amuses me, I think it also expresses why your example isn't useful. The intellectualoids are making all of these Forge-esque "story games" for a reason, namely that they feel that RPGs as they exist today are "bad" at making stories (which is true in one sense, since that's not the GOAL of real RPGs), and that the kind of stories they would like to make are vastly superior to the kind of gameplay that most other people have. So they're trying to change what RPGs do, at the most fundamental level, to acheive this goal.


RPGPundit

Quote from: -E.I'm not asking for anything traditional games don't excel at delivering. And I doubt that games that address these priorities in their marketing text would be as popular as they are if lots of other people didn't share those priorities.

Interestingly: I think trying to take care of those priorities with game-system is not a solution. I find games that *don't* exalt their "story-telling" mechanics to be much better at telling stories than games that claim to be all about creating narrative fiction. Give me AD&D over the latest story-telling darling anyday.

Cheers,
-E.

Of course, because IN YOUR CASE, you have defined the "story" you want as actually being just roleplay and a totally spontaneous unfolding of events as they happen.

This is what I like too.

And in this, traditional games are VASTLY superior to all the story-games out there, because they don't try to create crutches for roleplay, they say "just roleplay it". You don't need a mechanic to deal with the fucking "stakes", or something that will force your character to feel a certain way, you CHOOSE all that shit yourself and you express it not in some goddamned mechanic of "trying to roll dice to force the DM and other players to let you have your way", you express it by trying to actually roleplay in such a way that you'll get what you want.

So for what we like, traditional games work just fine.  The problem is that what the other guys like, what they get their jollies from, is fuck all to do with that. The type of games that they want to play have nothing to do with anything that would entertain us.  Its just unfortunate that instead of going off and starting their own hobby, they want to come in here and steal ours from us.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditOf course, because IN YOUR CASE, you have defined the "story" you want as actually being just roleplay and a totally spontaneous unfolding of events as they happen.

This is what I like too.

And in this, traditional games are VASTLY superior to all the story-games out there, because they don't try to create crutches for roleplay, they say "just roleplay it". You don't need a mechanic to deal with the fucking "stakes", or something that will force your character to feel a certain way, you CHOOSE all that shit yourself and you express it not in some goddamned mechanic of "trying to roll dice to force the DM and other players to let you have your way", you express it by trying to actually roleplay in such a way that you'll get what you want.

So for what we like, traditional games work just fine.  The problem is that what the other guys like, what they get their jollies from, is fuck all to do with that. The type of games that they want to play have nothing to do with anything that would entertain us.  Its just unfortunate that instead of going off and starting their own hobby, they want to come in here and steal ours from us.

RPGPundit

I'm defining story as "what happens in the game" -- that's true. But it's not a total dodge.

See, I want stories like Lord of the Rings, Die Hard, Aliens, etc. (I listed the first one because it's classic D&D and the last two because, for some reason, they get pointed to as Narrativist by certain theorists who don't understand their own theory all that well; but I liked'em well enough, so they're in the list).

Here's the trick: How do you just "have things unfold" but still get compelling, reasonably 'tight' stories without railroading or player-authorship?

Simple: All those stories -- and most RPG scenarios -- have some key things in common

1) Interesting, active (i.e. not-passive) characters
2) A starting situation that is likely to lead, quickly, to conflict
3) Enough complexity and balance between opposing forces that the situation isn't likely to be resolved too quickly one way or the other

A set of players (GM-inclusive) who puts some thought into creating a starting scenario with these characteristics is, IME, likely to get a compelling story with (roughly) the structure of a novel or movie.

All, without the Players having to do any "authoring" or the GM doing any railroading.

Here's where I think people who *want* story, but don't get it from traditional games go wrong:

1) Bad scenario construction. If you're not well aware of the PC's (and their allies) capabilities, it's all too easy to develop a scenario that gets short-circuted one way or another (classice examples: TPK in the first encounter or the PC's beat the major bad-guy and win the game in the first encounter)

2) Lack of basic agreement and trust on the part of the players (GM-inclusive) so that the scenario developed doesn't appeal to the characters, or otherwise gets walked away from (or everyone scatters, purusing their own, separate agendas)

3) GM wants to tell a particular story; this is the classic railroad and in my experience usually ends quickly in a "train wreck" followed by the eviction of the GM.

4) Failure to develop interesting settings, NPCs, and a believeable world. If the PCs' are going to have free reign in the world, it needs to be consistent and not-paper-thin. The GM needs to be able to figure out how the PC's behavior gets reacted to, and do so in a way that makes sense. Failure to create a viable world makes free-rein roleplay fall apart, IME.

A lot of this is, as I said before, a matter of GM skill. I think one of the gating factors on RPG play is the skill level of the GM. Fortunately, there are a lot of people out there who are natural storytellers. Absent bullshit, it's usually not hard to find someone who's good at it, who finds GMing fulfilling.

Bottom Line: I regularly get "stories" from the games I play in that would make good short stories, movies or novels. Some of them don't even need much editing... I don't get railroaded or "illusioned" (or whatever the current theory word is) or any of that nonsense, and the groups I play with don't use special mechanics or story-creation games.

We just get a bunch of high-energy players and a GM on the same page and let them go.

Sometimes it doesn't work -- sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes the master-strategist figures out a way to win in one move. But that happens *rarely* enough that when it *does* work we know we pulled it off; we know it means something. And it means that the outcome was earned.

For me, that's what RPG play is all about.

Cheers,
-E.

E:

You say you want "story," but when you describe what you want out of it I hear "I want a good game."

Are you arguing that a pleasing narrative is a natural outgrowth of a good game?  If so, it would seem that we are aguing against each other in favor of the same thing.

Quote from: fonkaygarryE:

You say you want "story," but when you describe what you want out of it I hear "I want a good game."

Are you arguing that a pleasing narrative is a natural outgrowth of a good game?  If so, it would seem that we are aguing against each other in favor of the same thing.

I'm not sure I'm actually arguing against *anyone* -- I think I have far more points of agreement than disagreement here.

To be clear, here's what I'm saying

1) RPG's aren't any good for telling someone's specific story; attempts at this are usually called "railroading"

2) With skilled scenario design and a group that trusts and communicates with one another, traditional RPG play will give rise to play that meets (most of) the standards for "stories" from media such as movies and books -- without railroading or non-traditional mechanics.

I think the only people I'm disagreeing with aren't actually *here* -- the people saying the only way to get a recognizable story structure out of a game is with some form of railroading or by mechanics that make everyone the author.

I *disagree* with that.

I would compare the games I like to movies and books I like:

I prefer books and movies ("stories") where the characters and the world act in accordance with their own natures -- where I don't, as a viewer, see the "wheels of the plot" moving.

In those stories, the action flows from the characters behaving as they do based on what they know, what they believe, and what they prioritize.

In those stories the world is impersonal. People live or die based, not on the plot needs, but on the results of their behavior.

Reservior Dogs is a pretty good example of this; it could easily be run as an RPG scenario and would almost inevitably create a compelling story.

The "GM" wouldn't have to railroad anything (or even, depending on who was a PC, make many decisions). The drama and conflict are all in the setup. I would include having a captured cop as part of the setup and I would include Mr. Orange's wound as part of the setup (essentially starting the game in the warehouse), but otherwise, you'd hardly need a GM.

And with players and GM on the same page, I think you'd get the sort of game I'm thinking of.

Cheers,
-E.

QuoteAnd yes, by that utterly loose and pointless definition, there is no conflict between story-making and RPGs.

See, that`s my conclusion too. I think I have "proven" that story has to be defined for the person uttering it. It has lost it`s power as a shorthand.
So we all have to be aware when someone says "story" and our first question must be:

"What do you mean by that."

Quote from: fonkaygarryOnce again we flirt with disaster by not having a solid definition of "story" to work from.  

Well, we don't need that solid a definition, really. A foggy one will do. Get too specific, and it's piss-easy to come up with some exception that looks like a "story" but doesn't fit exactly the definition. It's like trying to define the word "tall". It's a relative thing.

But how about this:

A "story" is a telling of something or someone changing, and why they changed.

If nothing changes, there's no "story", because nothing happened - it's just a "description."

"Bob sat on the park bench." That ain't a change, so no story.

"Bob sat on the park bench, crying at his lost love." Ah, now this is a potential story. We know something happened. He had a love, now he's lost it. What now? Well, we can go on to talk about how he lost his love in the past, or what'll happen to him in the future - we can talk about the changes, and that's a "story."

If we describe a change, but give no reasons for the change, again, that ain't a story, just a description. This is what some people call "theme" or a "moral" of the story - why things changed, and what that means.

In a roleplaying game, things change because a player-character made a decision. So in a roleplaying game, player-character decisions are the theme and moral of the story.

Quote from: fonkaygarryMore importantly, what the fuck does story mean in the context of a game wherein any of the players can up stumps and wreck any plot, rising action, denouement or climax they could build to/experience?

It means that we can have a crap story. But it's still a story. A story where you think the end was stupid, or wrong - that's still a story, just not a good story. I mean, if my car crashes into a tree, it's still a car. The fact that the car didn't go where I wanted it to doesn't make it "not a car" - just not a very good car. Still a car, though. And a crap story is still a story.

So: "story" is where something changes, and there's a reason for it. If nothing changes or there's no reason for it, it's not a story, just a description, a picture. If the change or the reason is stupid or wrong, then it's a crap story; but it's still a story.

Quote from: SettembriniSee, that`s my conclusion too. I think I have "proven" that story has to be defined for the person uttering it. It has lost it`s power as a shorthand.
So we all have to be aware when someone says "story" and our first question must be:

"What do you mean by that."

Or we could just not be deliberately dumb for the sake of argument.

"This steak tastes good."
"But what is steak? What is good?"
*thwap*

Quote from: fonkaygarryE:

You say you want "story," but when you describe what you want out of it I hear "I want a good game."

-E. is saying things in much the way I think of them.

The disconnect in certain discussions is people who hear 'story' and automatically think, or mean, something that works out to to 'preplanned plot', that is, railroading.  But the assumption that it has to work that way is a mistake: that isn't the only way to get events that I'd enjoy as a story if I read in a book -- let alone events which I'd enjoy as a story, and intend to enjoy as such, in an RPG.

Not only is it not true that one needs a preplanned plot if one intends to enjoy an RPG as a story, it isn't even true in fiction-writing, where the product is unambiguously not a game.  There are authors whose method of story generation is to put interesting characters in a conflict and simply follow them as they act according to their natures, to produce a rough draft.  Then, because the medium isn't live, they'll generally go back and edit and polish on subsequent drafts.  (In an RPG we don't do subsequent drafts, so the product has rough edges compared to published fiction.)

Since I take pleasure in good characterization, in development and compelling portrayal of the setting, and in watching characters resolve conflicts (or fail to resolve them), I have no hesitation about describing part of my enjoyment of RPGs as the enjoyment of story, or of using the vocabulary of fiction-writing to discuss it: it is useful to me, and I don't intend to give it up because some people can't get past the 'story = preplanned plot' association.  These are elements that are commonly associated with fiction, and not generally associated with the common run of games: the language of game theory won't help me to discuss technique in this dimension.

I take a large amount of pleasure in answering What If? questions: what would really happen if we put these characters in this situation, and let events develop by cause-and-effect, as they act according to their natures?  The naturalistic feel this method produces is not an essential characteristic of all story; and it slides over imperceptibly into the sort of pleasure I can take in playing a reasonably realistic tactical simulation.  In that sense, the sort of story I want from an RPG is closely allied to a particular sort of game.

However, there is a particular kind of pleasure I take in some kinds of games that I seldom, if ever, take in roleplaying, and that is the pure pleasure of defeating obstacles and overcoming competition in an objective and quantifiable way, without regard to whether the course of play simulates anything or informs me the way a good simulation does.  I would not tend to characterize my campaigns as good games in that sense, therefore.  They may be good games in the all-encompassing broad sense of game-as-pastime, but that sense of game is as broad as the 'any recounting of events' sense of story.  The word 'game' is as likely to mislead without clarification, I think: certainly it is not unambiguous either.

I don't preplot, in the sense of determining events beforehand, in my campaigns.  I set up conflicts at the beginning of play, and pose problems to the characters which I think are interesting, and which I suspect can be solved or at least productively addressed; but I often don't know myself for sure what the solution is, nor am I even certain that there is one.  The problem would not be interesting if if there were a plainly foreseeable path to a solution, if it were obvious what the characters should do.  I suppose some people might play through scenarios like this without enjoying them in the way they enjoy stories, or without finding the language of fiction useful in discussing technique; but I hardly find it necessary to follow suit, or to alter my vocabulary to mimic a perspective that isn't mine.

I don't consciously focus on the production of dramatic structures while we are actually playing.  I don't think that my not consciously focusing on patterns of rising and falling tension, climax, and denouement while we're playing is adequate reason for describing the story-pleasure I take in RPGs as a mere unintentional byproduct of playing a game: I intend to enjoy play as a story, and my methods are adapted to producing that sort of result in a manner that satisfies me.

My methods might not have the same result for everyone.  Perhaps a player in one of my campaigns would enjoy it primarily as a game.  Perhaps -- very likely, even -- someone whose idea of a good story is the kind of event patterns producted by Dogs in the Vineyard would think my stories unsatisfying.  That's as may be.  I don't believe that everyone wants, or gets, the same thing out of RPGs, or out of particular RPG techniques.

Part of the confusion, I think, arises because stories do not provide a single kind of pleasure.  The pleasure of watching a dramatic unfolding of events is only one of them, and while I do appreciate it, it isn't the only kind of pleasure I take in stories in other media -- I don't even think it's the most important.  Certainly it is not equally emphasized in all stories that I like; I have enjoyed taut suspense novels, but I have also enjoyed meandering novels whose plots are less prominent than their settings or their character portraits.

I suspect that there is no practical way to keep some people from making the story = plot = preplanned plot equation, because they think of stories primarily in terms of plot or particular dramatic patterns, which they may love or loathe in RPGs, and can't get that kind of dramatic pattern without preplotting.  So I doubt that the discussion is ever going to go away.  But I'm not willing to let these people have exclusive jurisdiction over the usage of 'story' with respect to RPGs, because I find it too useful myself.

Well put, Keran, and worth chewing over.

@JimBob:

You are totally missing my point. My point is not, that we have to define "story" once and for all, but that if somebody wants to talk aboput his Story-heavy-RPG, he has to define what he means.
Because story means tons of different stuff to tons of different people. It`s  too loaded up with connotations which totally  surpass any differences that the meaning of "steak" can have.

Yes. For some historical perspective, this conversation probably echoes old RGFA controversies over whether the selection of an interesting, conflict-laden set of starting conditions meant that a game was Dramatist, not Simulationist.

The perspective of people like Settembrini, RPGPundit, and myself, is that "telling a story" entails taking actions during the scenario which are mindful of how we, as an audience, want the narrative to run. And generally, it seems the more someone wants to approach a game this way, the more that person desires the power to directly influence and interface with the events in the narrative in ways that would not be possible for the person's PC.

JimBob, Marco, -E, and Keran believe that "telling a story" doesn't have to entail making such "narrative-level" decisions (as opposed to "character-level"), or using such "narrative-level" powers, beyond the construction of the initial conditions.

Between these two groups of people, it just looks like a semantic argument to me.

It would be interesting to see whether people believe that it's meaningful to talk about a tension between one's personal vision of a character and what one thinks would be most interesting for that character to do, in terms of the overall story, bearing in mind that the latter can be justified by retroactively revising the vision of the character. E.g., could I reasonably feel tension between a belief that my character wouldn't reveal some secret, and a sense that revealing the secret is exactly the right thing to do, from the perspective of the story?

QuoteBetween these two groups of people, it just looks like a semantic argument to me.

Even more like a syntactic argument. No "Story-Lover" in this thread, so far.

Quote from: TonyLB

QuoteEither you emulate dramatic structures, or you have freedom of participants actions, both do not go together.

Oooh! That's a bold assertion there. Do you know it to be bold (and controversial)? Or are you trying to say something that is obvious to you and might well be obvious to me, if I understood your intent more clearly?

I think it says very little. In fact, given the context where he seems to be thinking that he isn't emulating something (or maybe I have that wrong?), I think it says very, very little of import since I don't buy it in the least.  Because any freedom of participants actions are purely illusionary if they are in anyway bound by external rules.  And typically RPG participants, certainly the players at least, actions are bound very much bound by rules be they written or GM (or group) created.

Quote from: Settembrini@JimBob:

You are totally missing my point. My point is not, that we have to define "story" once and for all, but that if somebody wants to talk aboput his Story-heavy-RPG, he has to define what he means.
Because story means tons of different stuff to tons of different people. It`s  too loaded up with connotations which totally  surpass any differences that the meaning of "steak" can have.

How about realizing "story-heavy" for what it is?  Something that belongs over here. (http://www.buzzwhack.com/)

Then stop freaking when you see the word "story" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/story), or trying to mount some sort of pointless denial when it's pointed out that you as a GM put hours upon hours into working on the story underlying a game you are running. Instead with pride saying "Yes, I do put a lot of work into providing a well thought out senario that I find leaves players with a sense of having played a character that exists within a working, active, and engaging world that has a lot of verisimilitude."

QuoteAnd typically RPG participants, certainly the players at least, actions are bound very much bound by rules be they written or GM (or group) created.

So what?
The players have all degrees of freedom. Most importantly, they have the freedom to die in the first ten minutes, which is absent in most "story" venues, as they have script immunity. I´m playing a character, not emulating some  fantasy-hack-novel, or navel-gazing-Joss-Whedon-high-school trauma shit.

Your point: absent.

Quote from: SettembriniEven more like a syntactic argument. No "Story-Lover" in this thread, so far.

I'll take the job, but you might be dissapointed.

It's my opinion that RPGs naturally give rise to story, in a fuzzy-definition kind of way.  They are prevented from doing so, on occasion, by two possible things:

1. The system-at-the-table gets in the way.  And I don't mean the game book.  I mean the system-at-the-table.  You can use the d20 rules and get a fan-fucking-tastic story, but you need to put aside some things that are assumed by many users (and some writers) of d20 material.

2. Someone decides they want to tell a story they have in their head, rather than letting one simply emerge naturally from the way the group plays.  Some games actually try to encourage this.  See also: Why I despise the GM advice in World of Darkness.  

---

It's also possible to facilitate the creation of certain kinds of stories by building a system for it.  This, again, ain't a problem-free trick.  If you do, you'll always get the same kind of story, and you'll need to simply dispense with stuff outside the scope of that system as unimportant.  Basically, to turn an RPG into a story-making engine, you need to dump a whole lot of the flexibility that RPGs normally have.

Personally, I'm interested in having those games as well as the others.  Not everyone is, of course.

Quote from: SettembriniMost importantly, they have the freedom to die in the first ten minutes, which is absent in most "story" venues, as they have script immunity.

Your point: Based on mistaken and blanket assumptions.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenSee also: Why I despise the GM advice in World of Darkness.

Ding! Now that was a classic pile of festering illogical crap. Unless you actually wanted to have the GM be the director of his own prewritten script with the players as amatuer actors cast in the roles of the PCs. :(

Quote from: Levi Kornelsen1. The system-at-the-table gets in the way.  And I don't mean the game book.  I mean the system-at-the-table.  You can use the d20 rules and get a fan-fucking-tastic story, but you need to put aside some things that are assumed by many users (and some writers) of d20 material.

I'm curious what you see this as? I know what I see it as, just curious what you do.

QuoteBasically, to turn an RPG into a story-making engine, you need to dump a whole lot of the flexibility that RPGs normally have.

Er, that depends I think. You can still have a quite flexible system and have it directed towards being a story-making engine. The more you tune it towards a certain type of story or setting, the more you have to ignore/add to/change the rules to get the same breadth of options.  But this is just as true of any RPG of any style. The more you tune it towards a specific type of game, whatever that type is, the more it takes to deviate.

Quote from: blakkieUnless you actually wanted to have the GM be the director of his own prewritten script with the players as amatuer actors cast in the roles of the PCs. :(

Yes please. :hang:

Quote from: Levi KornelsenThe system-at-the-table gets in the way. And I don't mean the game book. I mean the system-at-the-table. You can use the d20 rules and get a fan-fucking-tastic story, but you need to put aside some things that are assumed by many users (and some writers) of d20 material.

Could you lay out some of those assumptions?

Quote from: blakkieI'm curious what you see this as? I know what I see it as, just curious what you do.

D20 came from wargaming roots.  As a community of players, there's lots of people that really dig on wargamey stuff that's not implicit in the actual engine of play.  The same attitude shows through in other things, too - and a game that focuses on it will dump story stuff to make room.

Which is totally awesome, if it's what you love.  If not, you can ignore it.

Quote from: blakkieThe more you tune it towards a specific type of game, whatever that type is, the more it takes to deviate.

Yes.  But currently, I haven't seen an RPG as utterly tuned to anything else.

Maybe Iron Heroes.  Maybe.

Quote from: fonkaygarryYes please. :hang:

And the award for best use of an emoticon in a forum post goes to...

Quote from: fonkaygarryYes please. :hang:

You sure? You'll be allowed, if not encouraged, to wear typical street clothes.....of a psychotic street mime (http://www.dearbloodymary.com/images/turning_goth_guy_lg.jpg). :teehee:

QuoteYour point: Based on mistaken and blanket assumptions.

So, if you care, what was your real point then? I seem to have misread you.

@Levi: We can go on and on about the specifics of certain stories within RPGs. We could also talk on and on about how to best represent tank battle command and control problems with the MoR or even within RPGs. "Story" is just one of many goals you can pursue with the MoR (and therby with RPGs),  and MoR is neat for many things, and "naturally" lends itself to create all kinds of shit like partnership therapy or training human resources managers.

Story is not the main goal of RPGs.

If you want a leisure activity (=game) that uses the MoR for creating a "story experience" whatever that may be for you, you have to change the system or at the minimum ignore all wargamey traits that Adventure RPGs happen to have. Which has been done terribly in the past, and which has been done at least funtionally in other instances.

Which is basically what you also say?

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYes.  But currently, I haven't seen an RPG as utterly tuned to anything else.

Maybe Iron Heroes.  Maybe.

Levi, could you expand upon this?

Quote from: SettembriniWhich is basically what you also say?

Sure.

Here's where I may be misreading you.

It seems as if you're saying that creating adventure is somehow a more "legitimate use", or something similar, of the core method than 'creating story', or training managers, or doing partnership therapy.

I don't think that's the case.  The tradition is immaterial.

If this thing you just handed me is the best back-scratcher in the world, I don't give a damn that you invented it as a good way to get spaghetti noodles out of water.  My back itches.

Quote from: Pebbles and MarblesLevi, could you expand upon this?

Can you name an RPG that is completely honed to provide a specific experience of play, to the point where it leaves out the stuff you'd use to "play it differently"?

I can - but they're all story-makers.  With the possible exception of Iron Heroes, which is tuned to producing the Sword And Sorcery feel and awesome tactical combat as an emulation; it doesn't give a damn about story-structures and such.

QuoteIt seems as if you're saying that creating adventure is somehow a more "legitimate use", or something similar, of the core method than 'creating story', or training managers, or doing partnership therapy.

No! Not at all!
Training managers is waaaayyyy older than RPGs. As long as one can differentiate the method from the organically grown hobby, one is on the safe side, and may scratch whatever itch there might be. More power to you and your itching back!

But the fallacy of taking the part (MoR) for the whole (RPGs) leads to all those shitty "This is not an RPG!" "RPGs are story creation Games!" phantom debates.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenCan you name an RPG that is completely honed to provide a specific experience of play, to the point where it leaves out the stuff you'd use to "play it differently"?

I can - but they're all story-makers.  With the possible exception of Iron Heroes, which is tuned to producing the Sword And Sorcery feel and awesome tactical combat as an emulation; it doesn't give a damn about story-structures and such.

No, I can't.

I have to admit further curiousity as to why you think Iron Heroes might do so, particularly when compared to other...umm...say, high "crunch"/tactical oriented RPGs.  Maybe compared to stuff like Spycraft 2.0 or something.

Mechwarrior?
Traveller?
Twilight:2000?
Harnmaster?
2300AD?
RC/OD&D?

All pretty up-front non-story high tactical, high simulation designs, especially  when taking into account the pubished adventures.

Quote from: SettembriniBut the fallacy of taking the part (MoR) for the whole (RPGs) leads to all those shitty "This is not an RPG!" "RPGs are story creation Games!" phantom debates.

Oh.

Yeah, I get you now.  Right on.

Quote from: Pebbles and MarblesNo, I can't.

You may want to read Breaking The Ice.  Not to play, just to see, because I'm not really sure I can explain it.

Quote from: Pebbles and MarblesI have to admit further curiousity as to why you think Iron Heroes might do so, particularly when compared to other...umm...say, high "crunch"/tactical oriented RPGs.  Maybe compared to stuff like Spycraft 2.0 or something.

Spycraft is vaguely close-ish.  Iron Heroes strikes me as closer.  Might just be my reading of the two, though.

Quote from: SettembriniMechwarrior?
Traveller?
Twilight:2000?
Harnmaster?
2300AD?
RC/OD&D?

All pretty up-front non-story high tactical, high simulation designs, especially  when taking into account the pubished adventures.

Of these, I've only played OD&D and Twilight: 2000 (and no supplements).  I've only read Twilight: 2000. Neither struck me as being so tactical-and-simulative that they would interfere, for me.

But we're wandering into the nebulous arena of "my personal tastes".

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYou may want to read Breaking The Ice.  Not to play, just to see, because I'm not really sure I can explain it.

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear in my response.  

I was saying that I couldn't think of a "traditional" RPG that was specifically honed to particularly approach to the extent that different approaches were impossible.

I can definately think of examples in what you called "story-makers".  Or what I'm assuming you mean as "story-makers".

Quote from: SettembriniStory is not the main goal of RPGs.

Or at least not for everyone: still, I'd rather say that all RPGs inevitably generate stories, but the significance of those stories to individual players varies wildly from one person to the next, possibly even within the same group.

Quote from: SettembriniSo what?
The players have all degrees of freedom. Most importantly, they have the freedom to die in the first ten minutes, which is absent in most "story" venues, as they have script immunity. I´m playing a character, not emulating some  fantasy-hack-novel, or navel-gazing-Joss-Whedon-high-school trauma shit.

Your point: absent.

Wrong.  By "navel-gazing-Joss-Whedon-high-school trauma shit" I assume you're talking about Buffy.  Characters can certainly die in the first ten minutes, and they don't have to come back.  It's up to the player to decide to spend the Drama Points needed to return.

Is D&D 3.x one of these "story" games you despise so much too?  Because from the way the game reads to me you can come back from the dead there too if you spend the money.  In both systems you effectively have plot immunity.  If the character is willing to spend the resources it is assumed they can continue playing.

This point though gives me an idea - next series I start convince one of the players to get vamped early on.  I mean it *could* be done arbitrarily, but that would be shitty and in Buffy hard to do without player consent.  It was done in the very first episode actually, and would be neat to do in a game.  That's not everyone's cup of tea but my players like to get all conspiratory with the GM, so it would be fun.  :)

QuoteStory is not the main goal of RPGs.

It isn't a goal for you, it is the main goal for me and many others.  Story is always there, as story means nothing more than a series of imagined events with an introduction, exposition, climax, and coda.  But those are just fancy words for beginning, middle, and end.  Unless you're playing in some alternate universe or something, each and every one of your game sessions has those.

Now you may not give much of a shit if the beginning part introduces the conflict, or the middle part raises the stakes, or if the end part brings it all together.  It might or it might not, and if the game just kind of meanders around it doesn't really bother anyone.  But they are always there, and always present.

However, one can focus on this, as they can focus on the tactical elements, or the method-acting elements, or what have you.  And in my experience it can make for some totally awesome gaming.  But it's a specific kind of gaming, and not everyone's cup of tea.

I agree totally with the original post, that story has become a very loaded word.  To me it's just one aspect of the game that one can focus on or not, but it's always there in anything recognizable as an RPG, just as are tactics, method-acting, and so on.  To many people it means railroading, but that seriously is not what I do.  I've had that argument on other boards to the point that I finally posted my notes before a game and then the results of the game to *finally* convince the anti-story people that I was not railroading.  In brief, while I aim for this structure I don't decide exactly how I'll do it ahead of time.  Nor do I restrict my players, they have total freedom with their characters.  If they do something unexpected, I just ask myself what would be the coolest result of that action.

"Story is not the main goal of RPGs" is an statement as valid as "Story is the main goal of RPGs." There's no unavoidable fact that proves things one way or the other.

I agree with Settembrini about story as a loaded word. And I really like the idea of axis of exchange (which I'm still thinking about). But I will disagree with anyone who says "THIS is the main goal of RPGs." My answer will be probably something like "So you say."

Imperator,

It`s easy: RPG is to be understood as ahistorical term. if you exchange RPG with Adventure Games, than all comes together. We are of basically the same opinion.

Quote from: SettembriniImperator,
It`s easy: RPG is to be understood asa historical term. if you exchange RPG with Adventure Games, than all comes together. We are of basically the same opinion.

Oh, I'm sure of that. But I also feel that people have used RPGs for very diverse things since the very beginning of the hobby. RPGs (wether adventure - games, story - games or whatnot) are a highly personal thing.

That's the reason why I'm not a big theory fan. Every RPG theory I've seen (be it the Landmarks, GNS, GDS, or whatever) starts with a very small amount of anecdotal data, henceforth having a very weak foundations. Most of them, if not all, contain some very good ideas, but they born with that fatal flaw. People plays for very diverse reasons than can be to make a story or not, and no one has the definite answer.

Quote from: ImperatorAnd I really like the idea of axis of exchange (which I'm still thinking about).

The axis of exchange is a false dilemma  You don't have to restrict player freedom in order to focus on story elements.

QuoteThe axis of exchange is a false dilemma  You don't have to restrict player freedom in order to focus on story elements.

You need to design new games using MoR for that. They are called thematic games, and are a different hobby.

MoR is a ball, not a sport. People keep mistaking the part for the whole.

Basketball is not Baseball. Balls both use.

Short: In regular, traditional, adventure RPGs, it is an axis of exchange.

Quote from: SettembriniYou need to design new games using MoR for that. They are called thematic games, and are a different hobby.

MoR is a ball, not a sport. People keep mistaking the part for the whole.

Basketball is not Baseball. Balls both use.

Short: In regular, traditional, adventure RPGs, it is an axis of exchange.

No, it's not.

We're at an impasse.  My games focus on story but remain quite recognizable as traditional adventure gaming.  Despite your insistence that anyone who plays different than you isn't "really" playing RPGs I'm going to go ahead and keep playing if that's okay.  The games that I have right now do so just fine, and honestly I could do the same thing with any system, more or less.  It does favor rules lighter systems or at least games with good mook rules to let the GM go off the cuff easier.

Who are you exactly to decide what's an RPG and what isn't.  Maybe you need to call your games wargames or something and leave roleplaying games to those of us that like to play roles.  :p

Quote from: SettembriniYou need to design new games using MoR for that. They are called thematic games, and are a different hobby.

MoR is a ball, not a sport. People keep mistaking the part for the whole.

Basketball is not Baseball. Balls both use.

Short: In regular, traditional, adventure RPGs, it is an axis of exchange.

But I'll object something: though your distinction between adventure games and thematic games is interesting, I don't feel that it is so strong as to make two seperate hobbies.

I mean, in both games you make a PC, and roleplay him. There may be a GM or not, or any other elements, but the key concept (you create a character and make decissions) is present in both of them. So I don't see such a difference.

Quote from: ImperatorI mean, in both games you make a PC, and roleplay him. There may be a GM or not, or any other elements, but the key concept (you create a character and make decissions) is present in both of them. So I don't see such a difference.

The difference is mostly on the GM side.  The player just plays their character, though they may have some ways of affecting the larger game world depending on the exact system.  I'd wager that my players most of the time don't consciously realize that there's this story structure going on, they just know that it's an awesome game.

But this is just what I do - there's many ways to skin a cat, and just because someone skins it different than you that doesn't mean they're playing RPGs wrong.  Your way of pretending to be some gay-ass elf isn't any better than anyone else's.

Quote from: ImperatorBut I'll object something: though your distinction between adventure games and thematic games is interesting, I don't feel that it is so strong as to make two seperate hobbies.

Interesting?  It is the same pack of misconceptions he is roling out again. And he is hammering on them over and over in this thread. :(  The very choice of "adventure games" belies this.

And that be my point Settembrini. You are lumping a whole lot of stuff together with what seems to be the very worst of Vampire the Mascarade. :/  This effect of an Axis you are talking about is a false dichotomy, at least the way you think it does. Because look again at your own game and how you set up the story in the making.  You predetermining some things, you had whole charts of relationships and a series of events on a timetable that are triggered outside of PCs influence.  Of course the players and the PCs have direct influence on the outcome, but there is a lot of stuff that be preset by you.  So freedom of choice is in a lot of ways an illusion with your game, although I'll say that total freedom of choice is usually a bad thing.  EDIT: Hey, I even have fun with such a game from time to time. It is just that I'm not as often in the mood for it and I grow bored of it very quickly.

At some point someone has to make a decision. At several points actually. And if the GM isn't making any of those decisions, then he isn't really involved. Unless you have massively take charge players (EDIT: or rules that are making ALL the decisions about direction of the plot, which tends not to happen in RPGs because they are all general use to some degree or other) you'll likely end up with a game lost and adrift. Propably very uninteresting....unless you like rolling dice for the sake of that. Which is fine and works for some people, it is what it is.

EDIT: Actually the closesest of the latter is propably that hex lookup game where you walk your PCs across hex map and see what pops up behind door number 5. Damn, the name is escaping me but it's been discussed here. Works with the Rules Compendium I believe. It is very much NOT a generator of an interesting story by itself outside of "then we killed a beholder, then we got past a trap, then we killed a wildabeast".  You could try to knit together a story in dialogue, but it'd end up sort of like those games where you are asked for a series of words given only the limit of "noun", "adjective", "verb", excettera and then those words are plugged into predetermined sentences and read that way as a "story". The result being sort of silly randomness that is hit-miss funny.

Quote from: blakkieInteresting?  It is the same pack of misconceptions he is roling out again. And he is hammering on them over and over in this thread. :(  The very choice of "adventure games" belies this.

Well, I don't see a distinction between RPGs based on the focus of them as very damaging. At least not as damaging as other distinctions around there. I dispute the notion that adventure games are RPGs and thematic games are not RPGs, or the like.

Quote from: blakkieAnd that be my point Settembrini. You are lumping a whole lot of stuff together with what seems to be the very worst of Vampire the Mascarade. :/

Well, tha could be true.

Quote from: MaddmanThe difference is mostly on the GM side.  The player just plays their character, though they may have some ways of affecting the larger game world depending on the exact system.  I'd wager that my players most of the time don't consciously realize that there's this story structure going on, they just know that it's an awesome game.

But this is just what I do - there's many ways to skin a cat, and just because someone skins it different than you that doesn't mean they're playing RPGs wrong.  Your way of pretending to be some gay-ass elf isn't any better than anyone else's.

So basically, you do a whole hidden railroading job on them? Fuck I'd never want to be in your game. Your players must be pretty thick too, or by now one of them would have figured out that nothing consequential they ever do is actually going to change anything.

And, in other words, the structure of RPGs is running smack into your desire to create a certain story, exactly like Settembrini said. To make your story, you need to railroad, whether its visible or hidden; and in doing that you're violating the basic principle of PC freedom of choice that is a convention of the game.

RPGPundit

Quote from: blakkieYour point: Based on mistaken and blanket assumptions.

Ding! Now that was a classic pile of festering illogical crap. Unless you actually wanted to have the GM be the director of his own prewritten script with the players as amatuer actors cast in the roles of the PCs. :(

I don't want one tinpot dictator any more than I want the "3-5 tinpot dictators each trying to push the story in their heads on a helpless GM" scenario that is popular with theorists today.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditSo basically, you do a whole hidden railroading job on them? Fuck I'd never want to be in your game. Your players must be pretty thick too, or by now one of them would have figured out that nothing consequential they ever do is actually going to change anything.

And, in other words, the structure of RPGs is running smack into your desire to create a certain story, exactly like Settembrini said. To make your story, you need to railroad, whether its visible or hidden; and in doing that you're violating the basic principle of PC freedom of choice that is a convention of the game.

RPGPundit

No, that's not what I do at all.  I'm not doing illusionism, where I railroad but hide the rails.  There are no rails.  When I say I create a story I mean I do it at the table.  And strictly speaking I don't create the story the group does as a whole.  Nor do I create a certain story.  I don't figure out what's going to happen ahead of time.  I put a conflict out there, or the players introduce it themselves as is becoming more and more common, and the group resolves it.  There's no pre-determined way for this resolution to happen.

When I say I create a story I mean an interesting one.  I do that by scene framing, encouraging pacing with the way I describe things, and so on.  I'm not pushing them at a certain ending, I'm pushing so that when we put the books up for the night we have some kind of emotionally satisfying climax or an exciting cliffhanger.  I don't always get there, but that's the goal.

Damn, this is P&P all over again.  I wish those posts had been saved - every time I say I'm not railroading someone comes back with "So you're railroading your just doing whatever first."  But no I am not in any meaningful sense railroading or constraining player actions.  They have total autonomy, and do things I don't expect all the time.  I don't try to limit this but see where it goes.

Quote from: RPGPunditI don't want one tinpot dictator any more than I want the "3-5 tinpot dictators each trying to push the story in their heads on a helpless GM" scenario that is popular with theorists today.

I can agree on that much.  I see the GM as first among peers.  He's not telling the story, he's facilitating the envornment in which one can be created.  Players trying to tell their own pre-determined story is no better than the GM doing so.

Quote from: RPGPunditSo basically, you do a whole hidden railroading job on them? Fuck I'd never want to be in your game. Your players must be pretty thick too, or by now one of them would have figured out that nothing consequential they ever do is actually going to change anything.

I don't see how you come to that conclusion.

Quote from: RPGPunditSo basically, you do a whole hidden railroading job on them? Fuck I'd never want to be in your game. Your players must be pretty thick too, or by now one of them would have figured out that nothing consequential they ever do is actually going to change anything.

You wouldn't play it but you run one...or three?

http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2157

QuoteAnd, in other words, the structure of RPGs is running smack into your desire to create a certain story, exactly like Settembrini said.

Who said I desired to create a certain specific story??? See that is the misconception, a story in a general direction by the outcome is vague. Not just little details of the outcome, but large swaths of the outcome.

In other words you just not be reading and thinking before posting. :p

QuoteI don't want one tinpot dictator any more than I want the "3-5 tinpot dictators each trying to push the story in their heads on a helpless GM" scenario that is popular with theorists today.

.....and then just role out empty words when you do post.

Mindless rhetoric? Come on, engage your fucking brain man. You got one, I know you do.

Quote from: ImperatorI don't see how you come to that conclusion.

I do. He running like a Eliza bot. Having prefab rants triggering on words with no context. Even if one post following the other is well, contradictory. It's like he is desparate to find something in the world to bitch and rile about. But really, it isn't that hard to find real things to bitch about if you just take the time to look. :)

EDIT: Really, you can't take him too seriously. If you did somehow try to implement things to address his rants then noboby playing the game would make any sort of decisions at all.  Nor the game rules either because then it would be the game designer dictating how you play. :pundit:

Quote from: ImperatorI don't see how you come to that conclusion.

To Pundit, creating story = illusionism.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenTo Pundit, creating story = illusionism.

Well, I think that's a big misrepresentation.

I think that, in every game, some sort of story is created. It may be not the purpose of the participants, but that happen.

Sometimes, my players make decissions with their PCs by this question: 'What would my character do in this situation, that would be a cool thing for everyone and made the action (and thus the story) advance?' And they act according to that. They are roleplaying their characters. They can be also addresing a premise or theme. And they are kicking ass and taking names. All of that at once. And I, as GM, try to address a theme or premise (sometimes), but I don't interfere with their actions other than to say 'roll some dice and get this result or better.'

I don't think that I am railroding my players. But we're creating a story. Sometimes is intentional (i.e., we played Sorcerer with the premise 'How much is your soul worthy?'), sometimes it is not (i.e., my g/f and I play James Bond 007, and a story develops, though we are not pecifically looking for it.

I think that the Pundit confuses some things.

Creating Story: Process v. Product.

I think one of the major points of discussion here falls into the process v. product category.

Product: A story. That is, a sequence of events, characters, etc. that fits some reasonable definition of a story. Basically that it would be interesting if told / written down / filmed to people not-necessarily-involved in creating it.

Process: How one goes about creating a story.

In RPGs, the *product* is somewhat dependent on the *process* used. It can be challlenging to get a high-quality story out of RPGs because

1) RPGs are collaborative (many forms of story-creating such as novel-writing and oral story telling are far *less* collaborative)
2) In traditional RPGs not all the collaborators have the same / complete information; they may have radically different *visions* for the focus, tone, or type of story
3) RPGs happen in real-time with very little ability to edit
4) The tools for getting all the collaborators on the same page are limited (something theory attempts, in part, to address)

Given these difficulties, one common, if relatively ineffective *process* for creating story is the GM railroad. This has an 'advantage' that it produces (if it works) the *GM's* story...

But I think we all agree that that's a remarkably inefficient way to use RPGs to create story.

But there's other ways to create virtually the same product -- and, in fact, they're used in domains other than RPGs. In both books and movies, story-creators (i.e. authors and directors) sort of "let the characters go" and "see what happens." In a lot of movies and books, the people in charge are "making it up as they go" to a very large extent.

This process is very similar in many ways to what happens in RPGs. Those kinds of stories are high-quality; often compelling. Same with RPGs, no?

The big difference that I can see is that in the trully collaborative, set up a cool situation and let things go approach, you don't get someone's pre-planned story. But you still get a story -- potentially, a very good one.

I think if we can separate process from product, we can agree that "a good story" -- one that would be actually interesting if someone told it to you (e.g. not "Let me tell you about my elf...") is a fairly common priority for players.

I also think we'd agree that traditional RPGs are pretty good at delivering those stories so long as the initial conditions (character, situation, setting, etc.) are in good shape...

And finally, agree that using RPG's you're not going to get one person's story; the whole point of playing a collaborative game is to have everyone contribute.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: blakkieEDIT: Really, you can't take him too seriously. If you did somehow try to implement things to address his rants then noboby playing the game would make any sort of decisions at all.  Nor the game rules either because then it would be the game designer dictating how you play. :pundit:

I don't take him seriously when he's ranting. ;)

And on the rest of your post: well, not making any decision has some... zen-like charm :D

Quote from: ImperatorAnd on the rest of your post: well, not making any decision has some... zen-like charm :D

Some of my friends and I have talked, in that semi-serious "This'll never happen, but what if it DID?" way about making a "Waiting For Godot LARP."

Put it in the schedule of the con, show up well before the game-slot and litter index cards with fragments of character, situation and rules around the room, then never show up to give anyone any direction on how to use them or what the point of the game is.

Quote from: -E.But there's other ways to create virtually the same product -- and, in fact, they're used in domains other than RPGs. In both books and movies, story-creators (i.e. authors and directors) sort of "let the characters go" and "see what happens." In a lot of movies and books, the people in charge are "making it up as they go" to a very large extent.

Having read literally dozens of books on writing fiction, I don't think this is true at all.  Not only do fiction writing books frequently suggest planning, outlines, and revisions but agents and publishers ask for the first three chapters and the last chapter for a reason.  They want to make sure that the author knows where the story is going because they know that if the author doesn't know that, they aren't likely to finish or produce a good book.

For example, Holly Lisle's essay How to Finish A Novel (http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-3.html) begins with this initial piece of advice, "First, know how it ends."

She explains, "This may seem obvious -- but then again, maybe not. Back in my days of thirty-page novel starts that never went anywhere, I never knew how the story would end. It was only when I figured this key point out that I finished a novel."

She also suggests "Write your ending, and then write to it" and "Use an outline."   She, like other authors, also advises revision and editing.

So, sorry, I'm not buying it.  Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go?  Sure, and it usually shows.

Quote from: -E.This process is very similar in many ways to what happens in RPGs. Those kinds of stories are high-quality; often compelling. Same with RPGs, no?

Can you name me a successful author, book, or movie that you know was written by simply "let[ting] the characters go" and "see[ing] what happens"?  I'm curious what you have in mind here.

Quote from: -E.I think if we can separate process from product, we can agree that "a good story" -- one that would be actually interesting if someone told it to you (e.g. not "Let me tell you about my elf...") is a fairly common priority for players.

Given that most of the stories that role-players tend to tell each other seem to be of the "Let me tell you about my elf..." variety and the rest are so boring that the boredom of listening to someone else talk about their game has become almost as cliched as the boredom of listening to someone talk about their vacation, I disagree with this assessment, too.

Quote from: TonyLBPut it in the schedule of the con, show up well before the game-slot and litter index cards with fragments of character, situation and rules around the room, then never show up to give anyone any direction on how to use them or what the point of the game is.

I've done this.

Not at a con, but in an abandoned house; I invited the players anonymously, with pregenerated characters, prepped the house, and then came to game after it had started as just another late player.  It was a 'modern occult' game, and I had set up all sorts of weird shit - the neighboring kid had been paid to throw glass bottles out his window to smash on the back driveway every so often, and other strangeness.

Some of the players still talk about it.  It gave some of them nightmares.

Levi:  You rock.  'nuff said.

Quote from: John MorrowHaving read literally dozens of books on writing fiction, I don't think this is true at all.  Not only do fiction writing books frequently suggest planning, outlines, and revisions but agents and publishers ask for the first three chapters and the last chapter for a reason.  They want to make sure that the author knows where the story is going because they know that if the author doesn't know that, they aren't likely to finish or produce a good book.

Not exactly.  A good many don't ask for the last chapter; the first three is standard.  And they generally want a new writer's manuscript to be complete before they bother to look at the submission because not everyone can finish a book successfully, whether or not they have an outline.

On the other hand, veteran writers may sell incomplete manuscripts or proposals, whatever their method of getting to the end of the story is, because they've shown that they can get there.

QuoteFor example, Holly Lisle's essay How to Finish A Novel (http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-3.html) begins with this initial piece of advice, "First, know how it ends."

That's Holly Lisle's method.  It's not the method of every working writer -- as she says, right in the opening: "These are the techniques that have worked for me."  If you want more information and a view on the variety of processes writers use to produce stories, go to rec.arts.sf.composition (http://www.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en) -- a fair number of published writers hang out there -- and either ask around or use Google to find posts by Patricia C. Wrede.  (There are others, of course, but she's particularly helpful in discussing writing processes.)

Different writers find different procedures to be useful.  The process that one writer finds essential to creating a story, another may find a deadly block to creativity.

QuoteSo, sorry, I'm not buying it.  Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go?  Sure, and it usually shows.
...
Can you name me a successful author, book, or movie that you know was written by simply "let[ting] the characters go" and "see[ing] what happens"?  I'm curious what you have in mind here.

The people who've made it up as they go along include Stephen King and Tolkien.  (Tolkien's early drafts have been published, and they certainly don't indicate that he had everything all planned out; and if I am recalling correctly, in one of his letters he thought he was most of the way through the story when he was writing Moria.)  Regardless of your personal reaction to either of these authors, I don't believe you can make a case that the method of making it up as you go along produces results that are generally deemed substandard fiction.

Quote from: John MorrowHaving read literally dozens of books on writing fiction, I don't think this is true at all.  Not only do fiction writing books frequently suggest planning, outlines, and revisions but agents and publishers ask for the first three chapters and the last chapter for a reason.  They want to make sure that the author knows where the story is going because they know that if the author doesn't know that, they aren't likely to finish or produce a good book.

For example, Holly Lisle's essay How to Finish A Novel (http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-3.html) begins with this initial piece of advice, "First, know how it ends."

She explains, "This may seem obvious -- but then again, maybe not. Back in my days of thirty-page novel starts that never went anywhere, I never knew how the story would end. It was only when I figured this key point out that I finished a novel."

She also suggests "Write your ending, and then write to it" and "Use an outline."   She, like other authors, also advises revision and editing.

So, sorry, I'm not buying it.  Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go?  Sure, and it usually shows.



Can you name me a successful author, book, or movie that you know was written by simply "let[ting] the characters go" and "see[ing] what happens"?  I'm curious what you have in mind here.



Given that most of the stories that role-players tend to tell each other seem to be of the "Let me tell you about my elf..." variety and the rest are so boring that the boredom of listening to someone else talk about their game has become almost as cliched as the boredom of listening to someone talk about their vacation, I disagree with this assessment, too.

I wouldn't begin to argue with the authors of "how to write fiction" books -- certainly I lack their qualifications.

I'm basing my assessment on what I've heard from successful authors and directors talk about *their* process.

I watched a marvelous movie about the making of Apocolyps Now a few years ago.

The ending was re-written several times during shooting. The original ending was scrapped before shooting began. One of the main characters (Kurtz/Brando) refused to learn his lines and ad-libbed most of his dialog. There was chaos on the set from beginning to end.

They began without knowing how it would end. They re-edited the ending after finsihing shooting (it's my understanding that this is *common* -- even up to re-shooting and totally changing the tone and outcome of the story).

I'm not sure Apocolypse Now stands up to the classics Holly Lisle has created; I may be shooting too low when I say that I'd be thrilled to have a game that played like Coppola's masterpiece.

I can provide some other examples of exactly the same sort of thing, if you'd like.

Cheers,
-E.

Folks, you are, by "dissenting" with me, totally supporting my main points:

1) RPG is a historic term

2) there can be other games which use the MoR, and are called RPG too, because they are lumped together even though they are different for historic reasons.

3) Story has only meaning in the mind of the user of this word, so there can be no general statements about story, except that you have to define it first.

Story vs Freedom is the exchange axis if story == "having dramatic structure"

And I never said story is good or bad, or that I only play the extreme structureless RPGs or adventures. Of course I want to have drama in my games too, and gleefully and conciously sacrifice some freedom on the altar of drama. But a choice as to be made, and every person likes a different mix of freedom and dramatic structure.

For me, "weather manipulation for mood support" is already way too far on the "drama/story" side of the axis. For most it is not, while still being adventure games.

Reality is complex, freedom vs story is just one of many axis were a Game can be. Think politics:
Freedom vs Government is not the end all in political debate, there is also Laicism vs Religion, Centralism vs. Federalism, Interventionism vs Isolationism etc ad nauseam.

Don`t let anybody tell you there is only two or three styles of gaming  going on...it`s a huge multidimensional cube where every thinkable spot can be filled.

Quote from: SettembriniStory vs Freedom is the exchange axis if story = "having dramatic structure"

Story vs Freedom is the exchange axis if story = "having dramatic structure imposed on the game."

If dramatic structure arises naturally, there is no such exchange.

Quote from: SettembriniFolks, you are, by "dissenting" with me, totally supporting my main points.

The problem you seem to think you aren't about the story as you are trying to descibe it. But in truth you are very much more about the story than many of the games you seem to think provide less freedom. :/

Further story verses freedom doesn't exist.  Predetermined story vs. freedom does.

Quote from: ImperatorOh, I'm sure of that. But I also feel that people have used RPGs for very diverse things since the very beginning of the hobby.

You may feel that, but I'd have to see evidence for such to believe it myself. The earliest I'm aware of is Glenn Blacow's Aspects of Adventure Gaming (http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html) from 1980.

Ron Edwards makes claims similar to yours in A Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragons (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/20/) but, again, without citations, it just looks like so much "Myth of the Golden Age".

Quote from: MaddmanNo, that's not what I do at all.  I'm not doing illusionism, where I railroad but hide the rails.  There are no rails.  When I say I create a story I mean I do it at the table.  And strictly speaking I don't create the story the group does as a whole.  Nor do I create a certain story.  I don't figure out what's going to happen ahead of time.  I put a conflict out there, or the players introduce it themselves as is becoming more and more common, and the group resolves it.  There's no pre-determined way for this resolution to happen.

When I say I create a story I mean an interesting one.  I do that by scene framing, encouraging pacing with the way I describe things, and so on.  I'm not pushing them at a certain ending, I'm pushing so that when we put the books up for the night we have some kind of emotionally satisfying climax or an exciting cliffhanger.  I don't always get there, but that's the goal.

Damn, this is P&P all over again.  I wish those posts had been saved - every time I say I'm not railroading someone comes back with "So you're railroading your just doing whatever first."  But no I am not in any meaningful sense railroading or constraining player actions.  They have total autonomy, and do things I don't expect all the time.  I don't try to limit this but see where it goes.

The fundamental question is this: If a player does something or wants to do something, or the dice (through combat or through random rolls) result in something where your vision of "the story" would end up being fucked up, do you accept what has happened, or do you alter the results or frame the situation in such a way to keep it "on track" with what your vision of "the story" is?

If you do the latter, then you have a conflict between story vs. game. And, incidentally, you are probably doing a sort of railroading.

If you do not, then you aren't really actively "creating story" at all, you are just playing the game, and any story that gets created is purely a "byproduct", and not a "goal".

RPGPundit

QuoteIf dramatic structure arises naturally, there is no such exchange.

Of course not. So we are all on the same here.
@blakkie: you are again, proving, that "story" as a word in a gaming context is way to broad, and has to be defined for the individual.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe fundamental question is this: If a player does something or wants to do something, or the dice (through combat or through random rolls) result in something where your vision of "the story" would end up being fucked up, do you accept what has happened, or do you alter the results or frame the situation in such a way to keep it "on track" with what your vision of "the story" is?

You question misses the mark utterly.

He has no fixed vision of what the story is.  He has a vision of the process that creates story naturally.

Quote from: -E.They began without knowing how it would end. They re-edited the ending after finsihing shooting (it's my understanding that this is *common* -- even up to re-shooting and totally changing the tone and outcome of the story).

Not true at all.  Apocalypse Now is a thinly veiled retelling of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  It has a very specific theme and end that you'll find in the movie.  

Added: To further clarify, re-shooting and editing, which are used to change the tone and outcome of a story are revision, something very few role-playing games use.  It's how you turn a random mess of stuff into something coherent.  Without it, you have a random mess of stuff.

@Olden Days: That quickly, dramatic-structure-lovers sprang up on the concept of MoR as delivered by D&D is a strange albeit totally logic artifact of the betwixtness of Fantasy/SF readers and Wargamers.
Humans are paradoxical in their desires, that`s part of our, human, condition. But:
D&D as a text, is supportive and (written with it in mind) of the wargamey approach. If there is one thing Ron does not know too much of, it`s D&D. It`s way safer to ask someone at or from ENWorld, or MythusMage, or Col Pladoh himself, than Ron.

Quote from: -E.They began without knowing how it would end. They re-edited the ending after finsihing shooting (it's my understanding that this is *common* -- even up to re-shooting and totally changing the tone and outcome of the story).

I really don't see how this, along with Keran's anecdote about Tolkien, doesn't completely support Settembrini's arguement. Both anecdotes are examples where in order to meet the needs of "story", the first impulse of the creators had to be mindfully overridden.

Quote from: Settembrini@blakkie: you are again, proving, that "story" as a word in a gaming context is way to broad, and has to be defined for the individual.

What a crock of bullshit. Because what you are doing is defining what you want "story" to mean, loading the word with negative connotations and striping it of it's English language meaning, and then painting that on each and every other person's (certainly mine) use of the word. In doing so you are helping kill a little bit of the English language.

Go you. :/

Quote from: blakkieYou wouldn't play it but you run one...or three?

http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2157

Nope, I'm running three campaigns with a timeline (or rather, two right now, the third hasn't started yet).

In that campaign, the players through their characters could be able to change history by their actions, and what would challenge them in doing so would not be my desire for the story to go a certain way, but the "weight of history".

In other words, if they try to start up a movement to cause the Roman empire to embrace christianity in 100ad instead of far later, I wouldn't try to stop them because it would "ruin my story"; they would, however, have to face the fact that neither the social situation of the Roman Empire of that time nor the nature of the Christianity of that time were really in a situation where they were ready to undergo that change (which is why, historically, christianity was not embraced by the roman mainstream in 100ad but much later).  Said player could try to undertake a monumental effort to change that, and might succeed to one degree or another, depending on what he does and how well he rows "against the stream" of history.
On the other hand, if said player decided (for whatever reason) that he would stab the Emperor Trajan through the heart without warning the next time he saw him, assuming he made his rolls, he would succeed, the Emperor Trajan might die, and all of history would change radically.  Likewise, some character might end up doing something without consciously planning it, something that they do essentially "by accident" (say, arranging to have Tacitus imprisoned, or blocking a certain young officer's ascension through the ranks because they don't personally like them) that could end up having tremendous historical consequences down the road.

Indeed, in my Roman campaign my players have attempted and both failed or succeeded at doing things that change history, and certain aspects of Roman history have changed from "our" reality as a result. Up till now they have yet to do something that has monumentally transformed history in the sense that the game would be more accurately described as an "alternate history" campaign, but they certainly could do so.

Ditto with my Legion campaign, and eventually with my Chinese campaign when I run it.

As a responsible GM, I do not let any impulse I might have for the story to go a certain way block my player's autonomy and free agency.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditAs a responsible GM, I do not let any impulse I might have for the story to go a certain way block my player's autonomy and free agency.

So how is that different that me? Well hello fucking dollie it ain't! You dipshit. That was my point, you are bitching at something that you are doing.  But pretending it is something else.

Quote from: John MorrowHaving read literally dozens of books on writing fiction, I don't think this is true at all.  Not only do fiction writing books frequently suggest planning, outlines, and revisions but agents and publishers ask for the first three chapters and the last chapter for a reason.  They want to make sure that the author knows where the story is going because they know that if the author doesn't know that, they aren't likely to finish or produce a good book.

For example, Holly Lisle's essay How to Finish A Novel (http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-3.html) begins with this initial piece of advice, "First, know how it ends."

She explains, "This may seem obvious -- but then again, maybe not. Back in my days of thirty-page novel starts that never went anywhere, I never knew how the story would end. It was only when I figured this key point out that I finished a novel."

She also suggests "Write your ending, and then write to it" and "Use an outline."   She, like other authors, also advises revision and editing.  

This is generally true. Whereas in RPGs, "knowing the ending" is pretty much the worst thing you can do as a GM.
Which is why I say that simply letting things go as they will with no influence is not "creating story", its just "playing the game":  what "story" happens is only created as a byproduct.

QuoteCan you name me a successful author, book, or movie that you know was written by simply "let[ting] the characters go" and "see[ing] what happens"?  I'm curious what you have in mind here.

Roger Zelazny claimed that he wrote much of the Amber novels in this way.
But then, Roger was brilliant and could get away with that.
On the other hand, Stephen King generally writes in such a way that its obvious he has no idea how most of his stories will end, which generally causes his endings to suck ass.

RPGPundit

Quote from: blakkieSo how is that different that me? Well hello fucking dollie it ain't! You dipshit. That was my point, you are bitching at something that you are doing.  But pretending it is something else.

Illusionism = The "hidden railroad" form of GMing.

To Pundit, all story-making games = Illusionism.

As I said.  I've explained another common way to him before, (http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13018&postcount=52) but apparently it just didn't stick.

Quote from: John MorrowNot true at all.  Apocalypse Now is a thinly veiled retelling of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  It has a very specific theme and end that you'll find in the movie.  

Added: To further clarify, re-shooting and editing, which are used to change the tone and outcome of a story are revision, something very few role-playing games use.  It's how you turn a random mess of stuff into something coherent.  Without it, you have a random mess of stuff.

I agree with you about revision -- my point was that you can, in fact, start a story or a movie without knowing the ending.

Knowing the broad strokes ("Guy goes up the river to meet Kurtz who is/has become homicidal") is all in the set up.

I will also note that the original screen play had a very different ending from the one on-screen. It might not be as true to the novel as you're thinking...

Back to revision:

Without revision, the story-product from an RPG is going to be less finished than one from an edited, revised work; but that doesn't mean they're "not stories" it may reduce the quality of the story -- but that's an aesthetic judgement.

I think Heart of Darkness / Apocolypse Now is a good example because it would make a pretty decent RPG scenario right out of the box, and almost any ending would be appropriate / themeatic.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe fundamental question is this: If a player does something or wants to do something, or the dice (through combat or through random rolls) result in something where your vision of "the story" would end up being fucked up, do you accept what has happened, or do you alter the results or frame the situation in such a way to keep it "on track" with what your vision of "the story" is?

There's an easy answer to this, of course, although for some unfathomable reason it doesn't seem to satisfy everyone...

"Never Say 'No'."

Quote from: Levi KornelsenIllusionism = The "hidden railroad" form of GMing.

To Pundit, all story-making games = Illusionism.

As I said.  I've explained another common way to him before, (http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13018&postcount=52) but apparently it just didn't stick.

I know, and that's a great way to put it. I'm just giving 'er another good old college try to get it to stick.  Using a few quick, brief strikes with a verbal mallet. ;)

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYou question misses the mark utterly.

He has no fixed vision of what the story is.  He has a vision of the process that creates story naturally.

You know, I'm getting the sense that if this was rpg.net, you and a few others here would already be getting bans for being "intentionally obtuse" (I think that's the term you use over there, right?).

You all know what I'm talking about: a PC dies in an early combat,  or tries to kill off an NPC you had later plans for, or a PC thinks of doing something that cuts out half of what you had "planned" for the adventure, or a PC acts in some other kind of unexpected way that you hadn't thought of that fucks up your "plans".

If you choose to "fudge" the process or the results in some way or another, you are choosing "story" over "play".

If the "vision of the process" in NO way interferes with the play, then it doesn't really exist as far as the play is concerned. You're just PLAYING THE GAME. You're not creating fuck all. Its just a pretty little thought you have in your head, but if you don't actually do anything to make sure it happens, you are essentially just engaging in wishful thinking and if it turns out the way you envisioned it, this is only because you got lucky in that nothing in the play got in the way of that, and you had no active role in "creating" that story. The story was just an accidental byproduct.

On the other hand, if you're willing to "fudge" in order to push your "vision of the process"; you are choosing story over play, and the conflict exists.

There is no clever semantic way around this: if you are TRYING to create story, then the story is a goal, and that goal is in CONFLICT with the goal of "playing the game" (except if the game you are playing is one that has changed so much from the Traditional concept of the RPG that it can't rightly be called an RPG anymore).

RPGPundit

Quote from: Levi KornelsenYou question misses the mark utterly.

He has no fixed vision of what the story is.  He has a vision of the process that creates story naturally.

Bingo.  And to answer Pundit's question yes, players will often do things I don't expect, and I've had huge unexpected changes to the game come from a die roll.  Paying attention to dramatic structure does NOT, for the millionth time, mean I've decided what's going to happen or what the 'right' course of action is ahead of time.

Quote from: GrimGentThere's an easy answer to this, of course, although for some unfathomable reason it doesn't seem to satisfy everyone...

"Never Say 'No'."

:killingme: :win:

Quote from: GrimGent"Never Say 'No'."

What is this, the "greatest hits of theory argument" thread?

If this keeps up, I'm going to have to start talking about poop.

Quote from: blakkieSo how is that different that me? Well hello fucking dollie it ain't! You dipshit. That was my point, you are bitching at something that you are doing.  But pretending it is something else.

If you really are doing exactly what I described above, then you are NOT "creating story".

RPGPundit

Quote from: KeranNot exactly.  A good many don't ask for the last chapter; the first three is standard.  And they generally want a new writer's manuscript to be complete before they bother to look at the submission because not everyone can finish a book successfully, whether or not they have an outline.

Correct.  But either way, they want to know that the story has an ending.  They don't trust authors to just magically get there by letting their characters run wild.

Quote from: KeranOn the other hand, veteran writers may sell incomplete manuscripts or proposals, whatever their method of getting to the end of the story is, because they've shown that they can get there.

Correct.  Can you name some successful writers who simply "let the characters go" and "see what happens"?

Quote from: KeranDifferent writers find different procedures to be useful.  The process that one writer finds essential to creating a story, another may find a deadly block to creativity.

Correct.  But I'm responding to the claim that, "In a lot of movies and books, the people in charge are 'making it up as they go' to a very large extent."  Do you believe that's true?

Quote from: KeranThe people who've made it up as they go along include Stephen King and Tolkien.  (Tolkien's early drafts have been published, and they certainly don't indicate that he had everything all planned out; and if I am recalling correctly, in one of his letters he thought he was most of the way through the story when he was writing Moria.)  Regardless of your personal reaction to either of these authors, I don't believe you can make a case that the method of making it up as you go along produces results that are generally deemed substandard fiction.

Are there a handful of naturals who can write stories correctly the first time without revision?  Absolutely.  Does that mean that Heinlein's advice that "You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order" was good advice for most writers?  No.  

Nor is the advice to "let the characters go" and "see what happens."  Could you produce a good story that way?  Absolutely.  But many if not most people can't and won't.

Generally, unless you are a Stephen King or a Tolkien, then it's often silly to think that what works for them will work for you.  If it does, and you are a Stephen King or a Tolkien, stop wasting your time on Internet message boards and go out and write best sellers.

Quote from: RPGPunditOn the other hand, if you're willing to "fudge" in order to push your "vision of the process"; you are choosing story over play, and the conflict exists.

If you're playing to make story that way, that process is part of the system.

It's not fudging if "we roll dice this way because it makes better story-stuff" is a basic rule of the game, now, is it?

Quote from: RPGPunditThere is no clever semantic way around this: if you are TRYING to create story, then the story is a goal, and that goal is in CONFLICT with the goal of "playing the game" (except if the game you are playing is one that has changed so much from the Traditional concept of the RPG that it can't rightly be called an RPG anymore).

This seems erily similar to something I read in Ron Edward's essay that just doesn't work for me.  That you have to choose one or the other.  Well that pure bullshit. It is from him and it is from you.  You can serve two masters.  You can just play the game and the story flows out.

Given good rules.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI really don't see how this, along with Keran's anecdote about Tolkien, doesn't completely support Settembrini's arguement. Both anecdotes are examples where in order to meet the needs of "story", the first impulse of the creators had to be mindfully overridden.

We're looking at two things here:

1) Do you have to know the ending when you start out to have a "story"
2) How does the ability to revise/edit affect story creation

I say the answer to #1 is "no." -- I believe people tell storys all the time without knowing how they'll turn out. Some stories may suffer from this -- they may run overlong. They may end in anti-climax... they may meander or lose themselves...

These things are all possible -- and given the nature of RPGs (an improvisational, performance art type of thing), I think they're even likely in many cases...

But with the right setup and preparation, the odds aren't actually all that bad, IME.

I think the answer to #2 is that not-being-able-to-revise hurts the quality of the finished product.

But not necessarily badly. There's no guarantee that any given RPG session will produce a high-quality story. Not being able to excise / edit out parts doesn't help, but again, at the end of the day, I find that the games I play in are more likely to produce a reasonable story than not.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenIllusionism = The "hidden railroad" form of GMing.

To Pundit, all story-making games = Illusionism.

As I said.  I've explained another common way to him before, (http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13018&postcount=52) but apparently it just didn't stick.

To me, "Front loading" is not creating the story, its just setting up the RPG. All RPGs by definition involve "front loading"; but that's not creating story, that's just setting up the scenario including potential conflicts of all kinds.

On the other hand, "driving" is to me a semantic dodge that excuses the GM trying to force story by forcing players to address the conflicts he wants them to address. It in no way escapes the issue of story vs. play existing as a conflicting pair of goals.

RPGpundit

Quote from: SettembriniIt`s way safer to ask someone at or from ENWorld, or MythusMage, or Col Pladoh himself, than Ron.

BTW, does anyone know if MythusMage is the same guy on rpg.net who has "original gamer" or something like that in his sig?

Quote from: RPGPunditTo me, "Front loading" is not creating the story, its just setting up the RPG. All RPGs by definition involve "front loading"; but that's not creating story, that's just setting up the scenario including potential conflicts of all kinds.

On the other hand, "driving" is to me a semantic dodge that excuses the GM trying to force story by forcing players to address the conflicts he wants them to address. It in no way escapes the issue of story vs. play existing as a conflicting pair of goals.

Trying to dress up "front loading" and "setting up the scenario" as not placing the conflict of your own choosing smack dab in the way of the player is a pure semantic dodge.  So tell me what you do when they turn and give your "front loaded" scenario the finger and turn and head the other way?

@blakkie: You mean a different thing with story than at least fifteenhundred other persons. And if you had read carefully, instead of trying the troll game,  you`d know, that  the negative connotations were there before Settembrini joined teh intarweb, and that I was reflecting on that phenomenon.

Quote from: RPGPunditOn the other hand, "driving" is to me a semantic dodge that excuses the GM trying to force story by forcing players to address the conflicts he wants them to address. It in no way escapes the issue of story vs. play existing as a conflicting pair of goals.

And you, of course, would never force players to address a conflict.

You have, for example, never run a dungeon.

Quote from: Levi KornelsenIf you're playing to make story that way, that process is part of the system.

It's not fudging if "we roll dice this way because it makes better story-stuff" is a basic rule of the game, now, is it?

But what if the roll doesn't make for better "story-stuff"? Then what? do you discard it?
In that case, why bother using rolls in the first place? The story is obviously more important than the game.

Do you go with it?
In that case, the game is more important than trying to tell the story.

Any game where the goal of the game IS to create the story is not going to be an RPG, because it will have to be created in such a way that all of the conventions and mechanics are changed in such a way that the game is all about trying to craft story and that takes precedent over playing the characters, running challenges, or anything else.  Those are "story-games"; not RPGs.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditYou know, I'm getting the sense that if this was rpg.net, you and a few others here would already be getting bans for being "intentionally obtuse" (I think that's the term you use over there, right?).

You all know what I'm talking about: a PC dies in an early combat,  or tries to kill off an NPC you had later plans for, or a PC thinks of doing something that cuts out half of what you had "planned" for the adventure, or a PC acts in some other kind of unexpected way that you hadn't thought of that fucks up your "plans".

If you choose to "fudge" the process or the results in some way or another, you are choosing "story" over "play".

I don't fudge anything.  I'm of the opinion that if you're fudging dice that means the system isn't doing what you want it do.  Fudging is a stopgap, but the real solution is to change the rules so they do what you want.  Metagame mechanics where the PCs can choose to recover from damage or get a large bonus on the roll.  I place those decisions in the hands of the players.

QuoteIf the "vision of the process" in NO way interferes with the play, then it doesn't really exist as far as the play is concerned. You're just PLAYING THE GAME. You're not creating fuck all. Its just a pretty little thought you have in your head, but if you don't actually do anything to make sure it happens, you are essentially just engaging in wishful thinking and if it turns out the way you envisioned it, this is only because you got lucky in that nothing in the play got in the way of that, and you had no active role in "creating" that story. The story was just an accidental byproduct.

I'd suggest that if the rules of the game interfere with the kind of story you want to create you need to change the rules of the game to suit your group.  I use a variety of techniques to help create a good story at the table - scene framing, pacing, and the way conflicts are presented.  The story is what comes about from the characters dealing with those conflicts.

QuoteOn the other hand, if you're willing to "fudge" in order to push your "vision of the process"; you are choosing story over play, and the conflict exists.

There is no clever semantic way around this: if you are TRYING to create story, then the story is a goal, and that goal is in CONFLICT with the goal of "playing the game" (except if the game you are playing is one that has changed so much from the Traditional concept of the RPG that it can't rightly be called an RPG anymore).

Creating a story does not conflict with playing a game.  Creating a story is non synonimous with railroading.  Heck, it isn't even correlated - a traditional, exploration of predefined locations kind of game can be just as railroading.

I'm really not trying to be obtuse.  Perhaps I'll create a post on the theory forum explaining exactly what I do both in prep and at the table.  It might help communication.

Quote from: blakkieThis seems erily similar to something I read in Ron Edward's essay that just doesn't work for me.  That you have to choose one or the other.  Well that pure bullshit. It is from him and it is from you.  You can serve two masters.  You can just play the game and the story flows out.

Given good rules.

Again, one more time: I'm not saying that story doesn't come out of RPG play. On the contrary, story is a very frequent byproduct of RPG play!

In my campaigns, a shitload of "story" happens, and my players often enjoy retelling and recreating said stories later in conversation.

What I'm saying is that you can't make that the GOAL of a game session ("we must create a story"), and not run into a conflict with the format of the RPG as a game.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Settembrini@blakkie: You mean a different thing with story than at least fifteenhundred other persons.

Congratulations! You should form a club based on these misconceptions. These guys did. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan)

QuoteAnd if you had read carefully, instead of trying the troll game,  

How about a big fuck you?  That is by far the least constructive thing I've ever seen you type out.

Quoteyou`d know, that  the negative connotations were there before Settembrini joined teh intarweb, and that I was reflecting on that phenomenon.

Yes, the misconception didn't start with you.  But you picking up and perpetuating the prejudice and misinformation isn't exactly helping the situation. :/

Quote from: blakkieTrying to dress up "front loading" and "setting up the scenario" as not placing the conflict of your own choosing smack dab in the way of the player is a pure semantic dodge.  So tell me what you do when they turn and give your "front loaded" scenario the finger and turn and head the other way?

If your goal is actually playing the game, you LET them turn and head the other way. Case closed.
Which is why "front loading" is not the same as "creating story".

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditWhat I'm saying is that you can't make that the GOAL of a game session ("we must create a story"), and not run into a conflict with the format of the RPG as a game.

And I'm saying my experience has been very much the opposite.  Sorry if you can't get your game together.  Maybe you should look into some rules that can aid this? :D :pundit:

Quote from: Levi KornelsenAnd you, of course, would never force players to address a conflict.

You have, for example, never run a dungeon.

Usually, my players don't need to be "forced" to play in one of MY dungeons.  I don't know what's wrong with your players or your dungeons that you have to force them to play it, but you might want to look into that...

And if my players want to turn around and leave the dungeon, then they turn around and leave the dungeon.

RPGpundit

:yesmaster:

Quote from: RPGPunditIf your goal is actually playing the game, you LET them turn and head the other way. Case closed.
Which is why "front loading" is not the same as "creating story".

Sure, they turn and go the other way. Then what do you do. You did the front loading for a reason, right? Without the front loading there what do you do?

EDIT: I mean after these 3 or 4 tinpot tyrants up and told you how the game was going to be. :yesmaster:

Quote from: RPGPunditBut what if the roll doesn't make for better "story-stuff"?

It will.

That's part of the process - I always set terms for the roll so that it always creates such stuff, whichever way it comes out, then rolling, and abiding by the roll.

I call this "making the roll interesting".

QuoteYes, the misconception didn't start with you. But you picking up and perpetuating the prejudice and misinformation isn't exactly helping the situation. :/

???
Afraid much of views other than your own?
Or is Settembrini now an authority in gaming, who`s every word is writ unto stone tablets and passed around GenCon for the midnight chant?
Why TF are you implying that I`m wielding some sort of power?
My only power comes through convincing people. Instead of whining and bitching, you should try to convince the readers of your point. Right now you are just attacking my right to try to make a point.

Quote from: RPGPunditUsually, my players don't need to be "forced" to play in one of MY dungeons.

Exactly.

You don't use force.   Neither do I.

Quote from: blakkieAnd I'm saying my experience has been very much the opposite.  Sorry if you can't get your game together.  Maybe you should look into some rules that can aid this? :D :pundit:

I don't WANT that kind of game.

But I know that there's a lot of people who do. And there's nothing wrong with that; but they should go and do it with games that are made for that, instead of trying to force RPGs to change into being able to do that for them.

RPGPundit

Quote from: blakkieTrying to dress up "front loading" and "setting up the scenario" as not placing the conflict of your own choosing smack dab in the way of the player is a pure semantic dodge.  So tell me what you do when they turn and give your "front loaded" scenario the finger and turn and head the other way?

As a big believer in "front-loading," absent some of the other discussion, I want to address this.

1. When I say 'front loading' I mean giving the players information about:
(a) How to build characters for the game.
(b) What the opening situation will encompass in terms of what they need to know to engage with the situation.

Example: In a modern-day horror game where the characters are going to work with a 'cult' that claims to be able to solve anyone's problems I instruct the players to make characters who have had their actions cause something horrible to be going on in their lives and that their characters are in a desperate situation--when offered a chance, even an unlikely one--they will investigate it because they are desperate.

(I actually qualified this a bit more--the PCs had no easy or likely way out of their situations on their own)

2. If the PCs declined to engage at all when play started, I would likely stop play and discuss with them whatever went wrong. I've never had this kind of agreement fail once it happens before play starts. What I don't do is "front load" something and forget to tell the players (and get their agreement).

-Marco

Quote from: Settembrini???
Afraid much of views other than your own?.

More like tired of people that have the access and ability to use dictionary but apparently refuse.

Quote from: RPGPunditBut I know that there's a lot of people who do. And there's nothing wrong with that; but they should go and do it with games that are made for that, instead of trying to force RPGs to change into being able to do that for them.

Too fucking bad.

This is a good back-scratcher.

@blakkie: So please define Story for us, once and for all.

Quote from: -E.I agree with you about revision -- my point was that you can, in fact, start a story or a movie without knowing the ending.

Knowing the broad strokes ("Guy goes up the river to meet Kurtz who is/has become homicidal") is all in the set up.

That's knowing the ending, in my opinion.  If Captain Willard decided to go AWOL or died from a random gunshot wound like one of the other characters in the movie, would there have been a movie?  Would it have been good?

Quote from: -E.I will also note that the original screen play had a very different ending from the one on-screen. It might not be as true to the novel as you're thinking...

There are all sorts of reasons why that movie could be made the way it was made but it ultimately involved making it up the river and meeting Kurtz.

I would argue that the similarities you see about Apocalypse Now and a role-playing game have a lot to do with the type of story Apocalypse Now is.  It's a series of experiences along the way to a destination, such that the details of the actual experiences didn't matter all that much.  That's why they were able to cut out the scenes with the Playmates and the French plantation for the theatrical release and they could just as easily have cut out many of the other scenes if they wanted to.  Is the surfing scene cool?  Yes.  Would the story still work if you cut it out?  Absolutely.

Quote from: -E.Without revision, the story-product from an RPG is going to be less finished than one from an edited, revised work; but that doesn't mean they're "not stories" it may reduce the quality of the story -- but that's an aesthetic judgement.

Again, my argument is that the issue is not "story" or "no story" but whether or not the players and GM are concerned about story quality or not.  If nobody is concerned about story quality, then you aren't reliably going to get good stories.

Quote from: -E.I think Heart of Darkness / Apocolypse Now is a good example because it would make a pretty decent RPG scenario right out of the box, and almost any ending would be appropriate / themeatic.

As a role-playing adventure, it's incredibly railroaded.  The main character, in both cases, is ordered by their superior to go up a river and complete a mission.  The river has no decision forks along the way.  It's a single "track", all the way up and if the characters step off, the story doesn't happen.

Quote from: blakkie:yesmaster:
Sure, they turn and go the other way. Then what do you do. You did the front loading for a reason, right? Without the front loading there what do you do?

EDIT: I mean after these 3 or 4 tinpot tyrants up and told you how the game was going to be. :yesmaster:

Hey, if they leave the dungeon its probably because they have some other idea of where they want to be.

If they don't, they might be in for a fairly boring game session... unless the reason they were to go to the dungeon in the first place was because some great evil was in there trying to come out, in which case by not going to the dungeon they might have other consequences.
But in any case, what will guide my hand is the emulation of the setting, and not some kind of meta- concept of trying to create literature.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditI don't WANT that kind of game.

Frankly you aren't demonstrating much of an ability to identify what is what. :pundit:

But I've got to go now. Time for Thanksgiving dinner.

Quote from: RPGPunditIf your goal is actually playing the game, you LET them turn and head the other way. Case closed.
Which is why "front loading" is not the same as "creating story".

RPGPundit

I think I agree with this -- I would articulate my goals this way:

1) My #1 priority is the fidelity of the game. I would rather end the game with an anticlimatic TPK than violate the game for other concerns. I think this is what you call "playing the game." It is, indeed, my #1 *priority*

The characters can do whatever they do, even if it ruins the "story." This fidelity is *necessary* for me to enjoy a game.

2) But that doesn't mean I want my stories needlessly ruined. I'd prefer that the game result in a "satisfying story" (defined below).

Now here's the thing: I think #1 leads directly to #2 with the right set up. No one knows what the story will be, but odds are it'll be *good* -- no one knows how it'll end... but the excitement is finding out.

I get bored with games where there's no conflict, no sense of accomplishment, no sense of character or place. Games that have those things tend to be good stories.

In my experience, if everyone's playing their characters at a high energy level, in a well constructed situation, the story you get'll be spectacular. And the *risk* that it might not go well makes it even more satisfying -- that's why it's critical that the GM not railroad and the players stay in character as much as they desire.

Cheers,
-E.

Satisfying story: A story I'd want to hear about even if I wasn't in the game.

Quote from: John MorrowThat's knowing the ending, in my opinion.  If Captain Willard decided to go AWOL or died from a random gunshot wound like one of the other characters in the movie, would there have been a movie?  Would it have been good?



There are all sorts of reasons why that movie could be made the way it was made but it ultimately involved making it up the river and meeting Kurtz.

I would argue that the similarities you see about Apocalypse Now and a role-playing game have a lot to do with the type of story Apocalypse Now is.  It's a series of experiences along the way to a destination, such that the details of the actual experiences didn't matter all that much.  That's why they were able to cut out the scenes with the Playmates and the French plantation for the theatrical release and they could just as easily have cut out many of the other scenes if they wanted to.  Is the surfing scene cool?  Yes.  Would the story still work if you cut it out?  Absolutely.



Again, my argument is that the issue is not "story" or "no story" but whether or not the players and GM are concerned about story quality or not.  If nobody is concerned about story quality, then you aren't reliably going to get good stories.



As a role-playing adventure, it's incredibly railroaded.  The main character, in both cases, is ordered by their superior to go up a river and complete a mission.  The river has no decision forks along the way.  It's a single "track", all the way up and if the characters step off, the story doesn't happen.

Interesting post!

1) Railroaded -- I disagree; the original script had the Willard character teaming up with Kurtz. In the movie he kills Kurtz. In an RPG, the players would be free to make either choice... I think the intermediate scenes *did* serve a purpose -- to make it clear what going up the river would do to you; to illustrate the implications of such a choice. In the end Willard chooses civilization.

• Games with missions aren't by-defiition railroads
• Games with only-one-outcome are. Apocolypse Now wasn't that. Clearly the people involved with creating it considered several outcomes. Such would be the case in an RPG

If I were running it as a game, I'd present it as a game where you play a group of soliders who get an order to find and kill a high level deserter. Having high-level buy-in by the players isn't the same as rail-roading. If someone said, "Oh. If we play that, I'll go AWOL first thing," we'd do a different game.

If the Willard character decided, after the first few encounters, to abandon his mission, I think *that* could be a really cool story, too. I'd play it out and see.

2) If I ran it as a game, and Willard got killed part way through, it might be a less compelling story than the movie was. That's a risk I'd take; I'd be willing to accept that risk as part of making the actual reaching-of-Kurtz be meaningful to the characters.

I will note that the movie portrays characters with a reasonable chance of success in their mission; if I were doing it in a game I'd stack the odds in the PC's favor (high-level characters against reasonably low-level opposition).

3) To your point about caring about stories -- if no one cares about stories, stories aren't going to be important. And no one's going to do the up-front work required to develop a story-rich environment & characters. But since no one cares, no harm done.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Elliot WilenIt would be interesting to see whether people believe that it's meaningful to talk about a tension between one's personal vision of a character and what one thinks would be most interesting for that character to do, in terms of the overall story, bearing in mind that the latter can be justified by retroactively revising the vision of the character. E.g., could I reasonably feel tension between a belief that my character wouldn't reveal some secret, and a sense that revealing the secret is exactly the right thing to do, from the perspective of the story?

Meaningful, yes.

One of the things that happens in discussions like this is that some people seem to come to the table with something like the Platonic Ideal of the Story in mind; and their particular take on the Ideal Story we're all trying to emulate seems to involve a lot of action falling into patterns that are not too probable, not very likely to happen naturally.  Sometimes someone gets explicit about what The Story is -- "It's like the best Hollywood action movie ever made!" -- but often it isn't explicitly stated.  What does come out, again and again and again, is that the person who doesn't believe it's possible to be intentionally telling stories in an RPG without railroading or manipulation of resolutions and character choices for dramatic effect:

• Has a plot-driven, pacing-centered idea of what the best stories are;
• Has a natural working method that involves explicit development and manipulation of the plot.

Neither of which is bad; but the first isn't the only possible taste in stories, and the second isn't the only possible working method.

I have enjoyed different works of fiction for different reasons.  I read A Deepness in the Sky because I was interested in Vinge's ideas, and Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds for much the same reason.  I read The Chronicles of Narnia and Lovecraft primarily for the aesthetic effect of contemplating some of the images and ideas; I read The Lord of the Rings both for that reason and for plot and theme; I watched The Twilight Zone for the themes explored; I read Faust and Shakespeare primarily for the poetry; I read Asimov's robot stories partly because I was intrigued by the walking tension that was Susan Calvin; I watch Stargate for the adventure and the humor; I watched the old Star Trek partly for the adventure, partly for the themes, and partly because I was interested in the relationships among the characters.  I read Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn chiefly for the evocative description, and Terry Pratchett for the humor.  I read The Hunt for Red October for the suspenseful plot; I read the early X-men for the artwork and for interest in the conflicted and powerful Jean Grey.

Plot, suspense, and adventure certainly show up as reasons for me to be interested in fictional works, but they are not so overwhelming an interest that I ever say to myself, "Well, if I don't create a climax as tense as that in North by Northewest, I don't have anything -- it wasn't a good story."  There is no way I can compress my positive experiences with fiction into such a narrow band as plot-only, or even plot-first, without -- frankly -- lying.

You can see this as a semantic difference or not, and there is a sense in which it is: there may be people who find my campaigns enjoyable, but not as stories -- it's not necessary to believe that my methods will produce the same effect for all players.  However, the breadth of what I value in story goes to the heart of my experience with fiction, to the point where it is not useful to me to talk of story in the plot-driven-only sense, while attempting to cram imagery, characterization and character development, pacing, setting development and portrayal into the concept of 'game' (or anything else): that division produces such a snarl in my concept of fiction that it's an active hindrance to clarity of thought.  I was on board with the simulation = !story jargon once, but while it produced some useful insights, there came a point where it inhibited the development of further insights.  I abandoned it then, and I won't be going back.

I think I have made it clear that I don't see story as one thing, with that one thing being the plot.  When it comes to a tension between a particular idea of a plot, and the natural actions of the character, I don't find it necessary to conceive of this as tension between story and that which is not story, therefore.  It's a tension between two different approaches to the story -- or, which story did I want to tell?

Did I conceive of the story as a particular plot, or a particular kind of plot?  In that case, if what the character's doing doesn't fit with it, maybe I'd need to adjust the character.

But maybe the story I want to tell is "How this character copes with their built-in conflict."  And if I want the story of a particular character as I conceived them -- if that's how my objective has come to me -- then I'm going to be thwarting, not furthering, my own end if I bend the character to fit external plot considerations.

In point of fact, I have tension between my vision of the main character and a version of the character who'd make the writing easier in a verse narrative I've been working on for some years now.

Some of the secondary characters are flamboyant and vocal.  It's easy to write dramatic scenes for them.

The main character is close-mouthed, and cryptic when he does say anything.  It's murderously difficult to write for him.  It'd make my life a heck of a lot easier if he were as vocal as the others: it'd be easier to get him to carry compelling and dramatic scenes, and not so easy for the secondary characters to upstage him.  Of course I should change him -- provided that it is my purpose to write any story about a similar character.

Which it isn't.  It's my purpose to write the story of the main character as I have conceived him; and unless I abandon my purpose, that rules out altering the character because writing somebody else would be easier.  What I need to do to fulfill the purpose I set out to accomplish is to develop the writing chops to compellingly portray a character who doesn't readily splash his emotions and tensions through the dialogue.

So -- certainly, I see the question as meaningful, and I've encountered something very like it in practice.  It just doesn't do anything at all to distinguish between story and game, or between theme and adventure, or speak to the difference between RPGs and non-RPGs; it doesn't fall on the story/!story boundary at all.

It is, in fact, this particular story, and this particular writing problem, that slapped me upside the head and made a Threefold critic out of me.  We'd have analyzed the same bloody problem in an RPG as a story/simulation clash -- as a clash between story considerations and non-story considerations.  But it's just as possible to analyze it as a clash between plot-driven story and character-driven story.

An awful lot of the semantic confusion vanished when I got specific and started saying 'plot' when it was plot I meant, and when I started saying 'preplanned plot' when I meant specifically that events were decided on in advance.  As soon as I did that, I quit having to pretend that hooks, pacing, characterization, character development, development and resolution of the setting, and all those other techniques that developed with the storyteller's art have no connection to it, and indeed may be employed in pursuit of an end opposed to storytelling -- when much of what's going on is that I let the characters drive the story, even as some novelists do.

Quote from: -E.1) Railroaded -- I disagree; the original script had the Willard character teaming up with Kurtz. In the movie he kills Kurtz.

Thus Coppola simply returned to an ending closer to the ending of the original story, probably because his new ending wouldn't have worked as well.

Quote from: -E.In an RPG, the players would be free to make either choice... I think the intermediate scenes *did* serve a purpose -- to make it clear what going up the river would do to you; to illustrate the implications of such a choice. In the end Willard chooses civilization.

As  I said, "It's a series of experiences along the way to a destination, such that the details of the actual experiences didn't matter all that much."  Yes, they served a purpose.  But any random selection of similar incidents could have served the same purpose.  Why?  Because they weren't driven by the choices of the protagonists.  They were things the protagonist simply experienced along the way.  He didn't shoot the girl hiding the puppy.  He didn't invite the Playmates.  He didn't want to go surfing.  They were set scenes.

Quote from: -E.

• Games with missions aren't by-defiition railroads
• Games with only-one-outcome are. Apocolypse Now wasn't that. Clearly the people involved with creating it considered several outcomes. Such would be the case in an RPG

A railroad is defined by a single track, not necessarily a single outcome.  And if story quality is a concern, many outcomes may be possible but only some will create good stories.  Others will create bad stories.  Some will produce mediocre stories, and so on.  If story quality is a concern, the GM and/or players will be encouraged to force the ending that creates a good story or they'll have to accept a mediocre or bad story.

Quote from: -E.If I were running it as a game, I'd present it as a game where you play a group of soliders who get an order to find and kill a high level deserter. Having high-level buy-in by the players isn't the same as rail-roading. If someone said, "Oh. If we play that, I'll go AWOL first thing," we'd do a different game.

Which means that the adventure relies on the players following the track. There are plenty of players who actually want and enjoy heavily railroaded adventures.  They want the GM to tell them a story and tell them what to do next.  That the players want it and buy into it doesn't make it any less of a track.

Quote from: -E.If the Willard character decided, after the first few encounters, to abandon his mission, I think *that* could be a really cool story, too. I'd play it out and see.

Or it could amount to nothing.  Again, I'm not saying that stories can't happen.  The issue is whether you try to guarantee good story quality or not.  If a movie that's been made on-the-fly goes off track, they can edit it back into shape.  That's not available in role-playing, most of the time.  If a rally cool story doesn't happen, then you are stuck with it.

Quote from: -E.2) If I ran it as a game, and Willard got killed part way through, it might be a less compelling story than the movie was. That's a risk I'd take; I'd be willing to accept that risk as part of making the actual reaching-of-Kurtz be meaningful to the characters.

That's not a story-oriented concern.  That's a character- or world-oriented concern.  You are willing to risk story for a greater concern.  That's the hierarchy that matters.

Quote from: -E.I will note that the movie portrays characters with a reasonable chance of success in their mission; if I were doing it in a game I'd stack the odds in the PC's favor (high-level characters against reasonably low-level opposition).

That's simply a world-oriented way to produce a story-oriented trip down the tracks.  The odds are stacked in the PCs' favor to produce a story-like result.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's essentially another form of script immunity.

Quote from: -E.3) To your point about caring about stories -- if no one cares about stories, stories aren't going to be important. And no one's going to do the up-front work required to develop a story-rich environment & characters. But since no one cares, no harm done.

Correct.  But there is also a lot of middle ground in there where conflicting priorities can come into play.

Quote from: KeranMeaningful, yes.

One of the things that happens in discussions like this is that some people seem to come to the table with something like the Platonic Ideal of the Story in mind; and their particular take on the Ideal Story we're all trying to emulate seems to involve a lot of action falling into patterns that are not too probable, not very likely to happen naturally.  Sometimes someone gets explicit about what The Story is -- "It's like the best Hollywood action movie ever made!" -- but often it isn't explicitly stated.  What does come out, again and again and again, is that the person who doesn't believe it's possible to be intentionally telling stories in an RPG without railroading or manipulation of resolutions and character choices for dramatic effect:

• Has a plot-driven, pacing-centered idea of what the best stories are;
• Has a natural working method that involves explicit development and manipulation of the plot.

Neither of which is bad; but the first isn't the only possible taste in stories, and the second isn't the only possible working method.

I have enjoyed different works of fiction for different reasons.  I read A Deepness in the Sky because I was interested in Vinge's ideas, and Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds for much the same reason.  I read The Chronicles of Narnia and Lovecraft primarily for the aesthetic effect of contemplating some of the images and ideas; I read The Lord of the Rings both for that reason and for plot and theme; I watched The Twilight Zone for the themes explored; I read Faust and Shakespeare primarily for the poetry; I read Asimov's robot stories partly because I was intrigued by the walking tension that was Susan Calvin; I watch Stargate for the adventure and the humor; I watched the old Star Trek partly for the adventure, partly for the themes, and partly because I was interested in the relationships among the characters.  I read Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn chiefly for the evocative description, and Terry Pratchett for the humor.  I read The Hunt for Red October for the suspenseful plot; I read the early X-men for the artwork and for interest in the conflicted and powerful Jean Grey.

Plot, suspense, and adventure certainly show up as reasons for me to be interested in fictional works, but they are not so overwhelming an interest that I ever say to myself, "Well, if I don't create a climax as tense as that in North by Northewest, I don't have anything -- it wasn't a good story."  There is no way I can compress my positive experiences with fiction into such a narrow band as plot-only, or even plot-first, without -- frankly -- lying.

You can see this as a semantic difference or not, and there is a sense in which it is: there may be people who find my campaigns enjoyable, but not as stories -- it's not necessary to believe that my methods will produce the same effect for all players.  However, the breadth of what I value in story goes to the heart of my experience with fiction, to the point where it is not useful to me to talk of story in the plot-driven-only sense, while attempting to cram imagery, characterization and character development, pacing, setting development and portrayal into the concept of 'game' (or anything else): that division produces such a snarl in my concept of fiction that it's an active hindrance to clarity of thought.  I was on board with the simulation = !story jargon once, but while it produced some useful insights, there came a point where it inhibited the development of further insights.  I abandoned it then, and I won't be going back.

I think I have made it clear that I don't see story as one thing, with that one thing being the plot.  When it comes to a tension between a particular idea of a plot, and the natural actions of the character, I don't find it necessary to conceive of this as tension between story and that which is not story, therefore.  It's a tension between two different approaches to the story -- or, which story did I want to tell?

Did I conceive of the story as a particular plot, or a particular kind of plot?  In that case, if what the character's doing doesn't fit with it, maybe I'd need to adjust the character.

But maybe the story I want to tell is "How this character copes with their built-in conflict."  And if I want the story of a particular character as I conceived them -- if that's how my objective has come to me -- then I'm going to be thwarting, not furthering, my own end if I bend the character to fit external plot considerations.

In point of fact, I have tension between my vision of the main character and a version of the character who'd make the writing easier in a verse narrative I've been working on for some years now.

Some of the secondary characters are flamboyant and vocal.  It's easy to write dramatic scenes for them.

The main character is close-mouthed, and cryptic when he does say anything.  It's murderously difficult to write for him.  It'd make my life a heck of a lot easier if he were as vocal as the others: it'd be easier to get him to carry compelling and dramatic scenes, and not so easy for the secondary characters to upstage him.  Of course I should change him -- provided that it is my purpose to write any story about a similar character.

Which it isn't.  It's my purpose to write the story of the main character as I have conceived him; and unless I abandon my purpose, that rules out altering the character because writing somebody else would be easier.  What I need to do to fulfill the purpose I set out to accomplish is to develop the writing chops to compellingly portray a character who doesn't readily splash his emotions and tensions through the dialogue.

So -- certainly, I see the question as meaningful, and I've encountered something very like it in practice.  It just doesn't do anything at all to distinguish between story and game, or between theme and adventure, or speak to the difference between RPGs and non-RPGs; it doesn't fall on the story/!story boundary at all.

It is, in fact, this particular story, and this particular writing problem, that slapped me upside the head and made a Threefold critic out of me.  We'd have analyzed the same bloody problem in an RPG as a story/simulation clash -- as a clash between story considerations and non-story considerations.  But it's just as possible to analyze it as a clash between plot-driven story and character-driven story.

An awful lot of the semantic confusion vanished when I got specific and started saying 'plot' when it was plot I meant, and when I started saying 'preplanned plot' when I meant specifically that events were decided on in advance.  As soon as I did that, I quit having to pretend that hooks, pacing, characterization, character development, development and resolution of the setting, and all those other techniques that developed with the storyteller's art have no connection to it, and indeed may be employed in pursuit of an end opposed to storytelling -- when much of what's going on is that I let the characters drive the story, even as some novelists do.

This is an awesome post and, I think, gets to the heart of the question posed.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI really don't see how this, along with Keran's anecdote about Tolkien, doesn't completely support Settembrini's arguement. Both anecdotes are examples where in order to meet the needs of "story", the first impulse of the creators had to be mindfully overridden.

No comment on Settembrini's argument, because as far as I can tell, I agree at least with the part about needing to define story if we're going to use it to discuss RPGs, and I'm not sure I have a solid grip yet on the rest of it.  

But -- stop me if I'm wrong -- it sounds like you're making another not-necessarily-correct assumption here: that the initial idea is what would naturally have happened, and that the override is in favor of The Plot Beautiful.  That doesn't have to be the case.

I had to scrap the first draft of the previously mentioned verse narrative.  I had a plot, and it seemed like a perfectly good one at the start; but as I wrote about the main character, I began to realize that he never would have taken the action I ascribed to him for the reason I had him taking it: it was out of character.  It would've worked for one of my other characters -- but not this one: he was too cautious.  In a plot-driven story, I could've adjusted the character concept to fit the plot, and had a heck of a lot less work to do over; but I was writing to discover and to tell the story of this particular character, which meant it was the plot that had to go.

It is necessary to the telling of a good story that the actions ascribed to the character should fit the character, or that the reason for the character taking an unusual action should be explained; but it is not necessary to story that, in case of a clash between plot and character, the character should be adjusted to fit the plot.

Quote from: John MorrowAre there a handful of naturals who can write stories correctly the first time without revision?  Absolutely.  Does that mean that Heinlein's advice that "You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order" was good advice for most writers?  No.  

Nor is the advice to "let the characters go" and "see what happens."  Could you produce a good story that way?  Absolutely.  But many if not most people can't and won't.

• Do you have a poll of published writers, showing what proportion of them know the end when they set out at the beginning?
• The existence of a single counterexample is sufficient to show that preplanned plot is not necessary to the successful execution of story.

QuoteGenerally, unless you are a Stephen King or a Tolkien, then it's often silly to think that what works for them will work for you.  If it does, and you are a Stephen King or a Tolkien, stop wasting your time on Internet message boards and go out and write best sellers.

And Rex Stout's method -- which was to write everything the first time and not revise at all -- didn't work for Tolkien, who revised extensively.  And Patricia C. Wrede's method, which is to write an outline that she then doesn't end up following because the characters do something else, but which gives her enough confidence to begin, doesn't work for Holly Lisle.  Patricia C. Wrede never thinks consciously about theme; another writer whose name I don't remember hearing, but whom she's mentioned, finds it essential to start with it.

You're apparently making an unsupported generalization based either on what you think ought to be true, or what works for you.  But I can't support it as a general principle of writing from my own knowledge, based on the reports of the published writers I listened to at rec.arts.sf.composition or at Forward Motion.

Patricia C. Wrede also teaches writing and disagrees sharply with the notion that there is any One True Way to write: she's had a lot of experience seeing different writers succeed with different methods.  She's left an awful lot of evidence of this opinion behind in the archives.  I decline to accept a contrary opinion apparently based on an idea of how things ought to work, rather than the reports of writers' own experiences.

Quote from: John MorrowAs  I said, "It's a series of experiences along the way to a destination, such that the details of the actual experiences didn't matter all that much."  Yes, they served a purpose.  But any random selection of similar incidents could have served the same purpose.  Why?  Because they weren't driven by the choices of the protagonists.  They were things the protagonist simply experienced along the way.  He didn't shoot the girl hiding the puppy.  He didn't invite the Playmates.  He didn't want to go surfing.  They were set scenes.

I don't buy that the experiences aren't all that important.

1. They are important to the audience (at least this audience member) as part of "the story." They, amongst other things, illuminate character and setting.
2. They would be important to me as a player in an RPG (from an immersed standpoint and making decisions about how I view right and wrong or at least who my character is).

QuoteA railroad is defined by a single track, not necessarily a single outcome.  And if story quality is a concern, many outcomes may be possible but only some will create good stories.  Others will create bad stories.  Some will produce mediocre stories, and so on.  If story quality is a concern, the GM and/or players will be encouraged to force the ending that creates a good story or they'll have to accept a mediocre or bad story.

I think I would be able to "hold story quality as a concern" and still accept a poor story the same way I'm willing to hold "getting out of the dungeon alive" as a concern and still accept a TPK.

I'd accept a bad story. It makes the cool storys that much richer, IMO.

QuoteWhich means that the adventure relies on the players following the track. There are plenty of players who actually want and enjoy heavily railroaded adventures.  They want the GM to tell them a story and tell them what to do next.  That the players want it and buy into it doesn't make it any less of a track.

Does this make all dungeons railroads? After all, there's a series of rooms and the players can't get to some without going through others?

Does this make Dogs in the Vinyard a railroad since the PCs are pointed at a town and instructed to uncover the sin and judge it?

I mean, if so, then some huge percent of RPG-play seems to fall into this category. It seems that if in each encounter along the way, the player gets to make a choice that is meaningful to them (either as an audience member thinking it's interesting that he doesn't take the girls or surf or as an invested player--deciding not to give back the surfboard) then gets to decide what to do at the end (join up or kill the target)--I don't see how that's more railroady than a dungeon or Dogs play.

QuoteOr it could amount to nothing.  Again, I'm not saying that stories can't happen.  The issue is whether you try to guarantee good story quality or not.  If a movie that's been made on-the-fly goes off track, they can edit it back into shape.  That's not available in role-playing, most of the time.  If a rally cool story doesn't happen, then you are stuck with it.

Again, my problem here is with *guarantee*--that seems like playing D&D where you *guarantee* that everyone will survive and get rich and level up because that's what someone has decided the 'goal of the game' is.

QuoteThat's simply a world-oriented way to produce a story-oriented trip down the tracks.  The odds are stacked in the PCs' favor to produce a story-like result.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's essentially another form of script immunity.

I think there's a big difference in script immunity and favorable odds (of course depending on "how favorable"). Certainly taking the chance-of-death down to a fairly low level will tend to produce a low-death game ... but lots of games and systems (Hero) are fairly low fatality at most power-levels.

-Marco

Quote from: KeranBut -- stop me if I'm wrong -- it sounds like you're making another not-necessarily-correct assumption here: that the initial idea is what would naturally have happened, and that the override is in favor of The Plot Beautiful.  That doesn't have to be the case.

No, you are right about that. It's a detail I missed, but both here and in your previous reply you do recognize a difference between "plot-driven" and "character-driven" stories, which I think is very close (at least) to what I've been calling story/game.

I wonder if it would help at all to recall that, back when David Berkman made a splash on rec.games.frp.advocacy with all his hyping of Theatrix, a bunch of people attacked the idea of "plot-based" games, while he vigorously defended the use of "plots". Only after tons of virtual ink had been wasted did Berkman clarify that what he meant by "plot" was, essentially, an interesting situation, not a predetermined course of events. That is, pretty much the reverse of how you're using the term. (Berkman based much of his argument and terminology on Syd Field, the writer of a manual for screenwriters.)

In short these discussions get nowhere when people fixate on what they think certain terms mean, instead of what the other people are trying to say--how they use those terms in the context of the conversation.

The same applies to RPGPundit's statements about whether certain games are or aren't RPGs. I think the argument over the term "RPG" is more trouble than it's worth, but underlying it is a claim that certain games or approaches to playing are fundamentally different from others. All this business about front-loading is a terrible distraction. Irrespective of whether they see the purpose of RPGs as "creating stories", most of the people here think that front-loading is okay. If someone is looking to have a real debate instead of semantic quibbling, they must look elsewhere.

Quote from: KeranOne of the things that happens in discussions like this is that some people seem to come to the table with something like the Platonic Ideal of the Story in mind; and their particular take on the Ideal Story we're all trying to emulate seems to involve a lot of action falling into patterns that are not too probable, not very likely to happen naturally.  Sometimes someone gets explicit about what The Story is -- "It's like the best Hollywood action movie ever made!" -- but often it isn't explicitly stated.  What does come out, again and again and again, is that the person who doesn't believe it's possible to be intentionally telling stories in an RPG without railroading or manipulation of resolutions and character choices for dramatic effect:

• Has a plot-driven, pacing-centered idea of what the best stories are;
• Has a natural working method that involves explicit development and manipulation of the plot.

Neither of which is bad; but the first isn't the only possible taste in stories, and the second isn't the only possible working method.

I personally am coming to the table with one very simple assumption -- that there are good stories and bad stories.  That assessment doesn't even need to be objective.  It can be entirely subjective for every participant.  It could include a plot-driven pacing-centered idea of what a good story, which is what  I think most people think of when they think of the aesthetics of story, or it could include any of the other things that you talk about -- the desire toe explore certain ideas, imagery, theme, language, adventure, humor, a particular character, and so on.  But, ultimately, it's a desire for a specific result.

When a human being is given a choice and selects choices that they think will produce something good or avoids choices that they think will produce something bad, it creates a pattern that is not natural, because nature don't care about a good story or a bad story.  The aesthetic filter that gets applied leaves a  pattern in what passes through it.  The more the filter is used, the more obvious it's mark will generally be.

In other words, when you intentionally set out to produce a certain effect, that intent can leave a noticeable trace.  It doesn't have to be as heavy handed as railroading or script immunity.  It can even be more about what doesn't happen than what does -- for example, if the players never simply stumble into the solution to a problem without having to work for it.  If the GM intentionally sets out to create a good story, no matter what that means, it will determine how the game plays out.  In other words, if you are trying to intentionally tell stories, either you can manipulate what happens to produce good stories or you can be indifferent to quality, unless you believe that good stories are always an inevitable outcome of any sequence of events.

For example, if the story goal you have is to see how a character copes with a built-in conflict, you will likely avoid any situations where another character or external event resolves the conflict for the character because that will rob you of experiencing the story you want to experience. If you apply a filter that prevents the conflict from being taken away from character or resolved in a mundane way though an external flow of events in the story outside of the character's control, then ever time you apply that filter, it leaves behind the mark of intent.  Often, that mark is not noticeable in isolation, but the more frequently the filter is applied, the more of a mark it leaves behind and the more likely it will be noticed.

The reason why people discuss your "Platonic Ideal of the Story" that "seems to involve a lot of action falling into patterns that are not too probable, not very likely to happen naturally" is that this is a very clear way of illustrating the application of a filter and how it is noticeable.  It's easier to notice script immunity in a violent game than it is to notice subtle shifts in NPC behavior to keep them from stepping on a PC's built-in conflicts.  But that doesn't mean that it's not possible to notice more subtle patterns, especially over the course of many games and a long "campaign".

Quote from: KeranI have enjoyed different works of fiction for different reasons.  I read A Deepness in the Sky because I was interested in Vinge's ideas, and Cherryh's Hunter of Worlds for much the same reason.  I read The Chronicles of Narnia and Lovecraft primarily for the aesthetic effect of contemplating some of the images and ideas; I read The Lord of the Rings both for that reason and for plot and theme; I watched The Twilight Zone for the themes explored; I read Faust and Shakespeare primarily for the poetry; I read Asimov's robot stories partly because I was intrigued by the walking tension that was Susan Calvin; I watch Stargate for the adventure and the humor; I watched the old Star Trek partly for the adventure, partly for the themes, and partly because I was interested in the relationships among the characters.  I read Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn chiefly for the evocative description, and Terry Pratchett for the humor.  I read The Hunt for Red October for the suspenseful plot; I read the early X-men for the artwork and for interest in the conflicted and powerful Jean Grey.

Plot, suspense, and adventure certainly show up as reasons for me to be interested in fictional works, but they are not so overwhelming an interest that I ever say to myself, "Well, if I don't create a climax as tense as that in North by Northewest, I don't have anything -- it wasn't a good story."  There is no way I can compress my positive experiences with fiction into such a narrow band as plot-only, or even plot-first, without -- frankly -- lying.

Would any of those books have been as successful if they didn't have a good plot?  That a story does other things well and can capture your attention in other ways does not mean that the fundamentals of plot, pacing, and so forth are not very important.  You don't need the climax of North by Northwest to have a good story but the absence of any climax or plot structure is going to leave most people going, "Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?"

Quote from: KeranI was on board with the simulation = !story jargon once, but while it produced some useful insights, there came a point where it inhibited the development of further insights.  I abandoned it then, and I won't be going back.

The simulation == !story was developed to explain why David Berkman's game Theatrix, which was heavily plot-oriented to the point where it was heavily influenced by Syd Field's books on screenplay plotting, didn't appeal to some of the regulars on rec.games.frp.advocacy.  That's why the language and focus deals with that distinction.  It does a very poor job of making distinctions between various types of story concerns and, as theory that revolves around resolution techniques, it does a very poor job of speaking toward set-up concerns such as setting up story-rich characters or settings, even if no sense of story actually gets forced during the game.

Quote from: KeranI think I have made it clear that I don't see story as one thing, with that one thing being the plot.  When it comes to a tension between a particular idea of a plot, and the natural actions of the character, I don't find it necessary to conceive of this as tension between story and that which is not story, therefore.  It's a tension between two different approaches to the story -- or, which story did I want to tell?

Do you agree that the natural actions of the character may not produce a good story?

Quote from: KeranDid I conceive of the story as a particular plot, or a particular kind of plot?  In that case, if what the character's doing doesn't fit with it, maybe I'd need to adjust the character.

But maybe the story I want to tell is "How this character copes with their built-in conflict."  And if I want the story of a particular character as I conceived them -- if that's how my objective has come to me -- then I'm going to be thwarting, not furthering, my own end if I bend the character to fit external plot considerations.

You also might not wind up telling an interesting story.  Is it possible that the way the character copes with their build-in conflict is boring or simply not terribly interesting?  And if you find yourself telling a story that's not terribly compelling for others to read, do you adjust your character, their build-in conflict, or events in the story or do you just let it go because you enjoyed the exploration of the character as a writer and don't care if the result is a story that other people would enjoy reading?

Quote from: KeranIn point of fact, I have tension between my vision of the main character and a version of the character who'd make the writing easier in a verse narrative I've been working on for some years now.

Some of the secondary characters are flamboyant and vocal.  It's easy to write dramatic scenes for them.

The main character is close-mouthed, and cryptic when he does say anything.  It's murderously difficult to write for him.  It'd make my life a heck of a lot easier if he were as vocal as the others: it'd be easier to get him to carry compelling and dramatic scenes, and not so easy for the secondary characters to upstage him.  Of course I should change him -- provided that it is my purpose to write any story about a similar character.

Which it isn't.  It's my purpose to write the story of the main character as I have conceived him; and unless I abandon my purpose, that rules out altering the character because writing somebody else would be easier.  What I need to do to fulfill the purpose I set out to accomplish is to develop the writing chops to compellingly portray a character who doesn't readily splash his emotions and tensions through the dialogue.

It is possible that your purpose isn't to write a story?  Is it possible that even after you develop your "writing chops", the character will not be compelling?  Are you writing to tell a story to others or are you writing to explore a character as an author?  You seem to assume that what you are doing will eventually work the way you intend.  Why are you so certain that this character addressing their built-in conflict will be an interesting story, no matter how it plays out?

Quote from: KeranSo -- certainly, I see the question as meaningful, and I've encountered something very like it in practice.  It just doesn't do anything at all to distinguish between story and game, or between theme and adventure, or speak to the difference between RPGs and non-RPGs; it doesn't fall on the story/!story boundary at all.

It is, in fact, this particular story, and this particular writing problem, that slapped me upside the head and made a Threefold critic out of me.  We'd have analyzed the same bloody problem in an RPG as a story/simulation clash -- as a clash between story considerations and non-story considerations.  But it's just as possible to analyze it as a clash between plot-driven story and character-driven story.

Do you care about the story quality of the end result or not?  If, for example, you reach a point where the way the character deals with their built-in conflict just isn't interesting, do you change the conflict, change the character, or simply live with the result because you accomplished your goal?

I read an interesting article about matching character to story that described swapping Othello and Hamlet into each other's situation.  Basically, Othello would just get on with the killing and the play would be boring.  Hamlet would do nothing and the play would be boring.  Not every combination of character and conflict produces an interesting story.

Quote from: KeranAn awful lot of the semantic confusion vanished when I got specific and started saying 'plot' when it was plot I meant, and when I started saying 'preplanned plot' when I meant specifically that events were decided on in advance.  As soon as I did that, I quit having to pretend that hooks, pacing, characterization, character development, development and resolution of the setting, and all those other techniques that developed with the storyteller's art have no connection to it, and indeed may be employed in pursuit of an end opposed to storytelling -- when much of what's going on is that I let the characters drive the story, even as some novelists do.

The issue with story is not necessarily pre-planning.  It's about the intentional manipulation of events in a game toward a certain story-like end.  And that's what all of those techniques are for.  If those issues didn't have to be managed and manipulated by an author to produce a good story, then they wouldn't be such important writing techniques.  And applying those techniques to filter what can and can't happen in a game or story can leave a noticeable footprint.

Quote from: Elliot WilenIt would be interesting to see whether people believe that it's meaningful to talk about a tension between one's personal vision of a character and what one thinks would be most interesting for that character to do, in terms of the overall story, bearing in mind that the latter can be justified by retroactively revising the vision of the character. E.g., could I reasonably feel tension between a belief that my character wouldn't reveal some secret, and a sense that revealing the secret is exactly the right thing to do, from the perspective of the story?

Interesting indeed. Correct me if I'm wrong but is it your contention that one of the shortcomings of "story" is that the player would be constrained by trying to keep within the perimeters of the story - or rather the story that is apparently being created? Because the tension that exist at least in my experience is not "what is right for the story" but rather "what is right for my character". If I misread your post, I apologize in advance.

Regards,
David R

Edit: I read Keran's post and your post upthread. Sorry, this is what happens when one joins the party late.

And here we see therpgsite starting to look like The Forge. Long, detailed posts splitting fine semantic hairs, with an excess of courtesy, "Because you are a poor writer and I'm a worse reader, you seem to be saying X. Given that, I say Y. Of course I may have misunderstood and I'm terribly sorry if I have." Plus that annoying affectation of writing posts like emails. "Dear Bob... blahblah... Love Jim."

I thought this was going to be a place of simple, plain and clear speech?

Quote from: JimBobOzAnd here we see therpgsite starting to look like The Forge. Long, detailed posts splitting fine semantic hairs, with an excess of courtesy, "Because you are a poor writer and I'm a worse reader, you seem to be saying X. Given that, I say Y. Of course I may have misunderstood and I'm terribly sorry if I have." Plus that annoying affectation of writing posts like emails. "Dear Bob... blahblah... Love Jim."

I thought this was going to be a place of simple, plain and clear speech?

Hey man, I was just trying to be polite. Okay, I admit, I was going to start my post with a "Dear JimBobOz..." but I assure you, there wasn't going to be any love at the end of it :D

Regards,
David R

Quote from: John MorrowThus Coppola simply returned to an ending closer to the ending of the original story, probably because his new ending wouldn't have worked as well.

I dunno man. The people involved said they "weren't sure how it would end." I tend to take them at their word. Even if, ultimately, the ending was similar to the one in the novel, that doesn't mean that they were sure to get there from the beginning.

Apocolypse Now was presented as an example of a story in which the ending was not pre-determined.

I can pull another one -- 28 Days Later -- the DVD has an alternate ending that's much bleaker than the one in the theatrical release. The director considered *both* and ultimately chose the later.

It's another example. Looking at my movie shelf, I see that True Romance has much the same commentary; according to QT, Tony Scott wanted the happy ending and advocated for it; in the end QT agreed it was -- in fact -- the correct ending for the film, as it was made.

I could go on -- a lot of novels and films get started without the end in mind. Someone already stated S. King works that way.

I think it's not only possible -- or even plausible -- it's not even *uncommon.*

Quote from: John MorrowA railroad is defined by a single track, not necessarily a single outcome.  And if story quality is a concern, many outcomes may be possible but only some will create good stories.  Others will create bad stories.  Some will produce mediocre stories, and so on.  If story quality is a concern, the GM and/or players will be encouraged to force the ending that creates a good story or they'll have to accept a mediocre or bad story.

I think railroading is more about how the game is run than how the starting situation is described. Plenty of military games and stories deal with being given a mission -- I mean, virtually every Star Trek episode begins with the crew coming to a new planet... does that make those stories (when translated into games) railroads by definition?

I don't think so -- ihere's my definition: f a player tries to take a not-predetermined course of action and is prevented by the GM, the game *might* be a railroad. If prevention happens in a way that the player considers "unfair" then it's definitely a railroad.

Quote from: John MorrowWhich means that the adventure relies on the players following the track. There are plenty of players who actually want and enjoy heavily railroaded adventures.  They want the GM to tell them a story and tell them what to do next.  That the players want it and buy into it doesn't make it any less of a track.

... maybe... but I doubt it. You can't look at finished piece of work and determine if was a railroad or not. Even by your definition.

How do you *know* that any potential railroad *relies* on the characters following the track?

The concept of a railroad only applies to RPG's -- you can't really look at a book or movie and say, "that would be a railroad." And in an RPG, you can't know if it *was* a railroad unless you can point to the 'rails' being enforced.

You're making assumptions that aren't warrented.

Quote from: John MorrowOr it could amount to nothing.  Again, I'm not saying that stories can't happen.  The issue is whether you try to guarantee good story quality or not.  If a movie that's been made on-the-fly goes off track, they can edit it back into shape.  That's not available in role-playing, most of the time.  If a rally cool story doesn't happen, then you are stuck with it.

Eh? It's all about the guarantee? Okay -- the we agree! There is no guarantee in roleplaying. There's no guarantee of a good story any time you set out on a creative endevor.

I certainly never claimed there was one -- I only claimed

1) That good stories can and do happen
2) They happen with relative frequency if you set things up right

As I've said before -- the *absence* of a guarantee is, for me, a bonus.

Quote from: John MorrowThat's not a story-oriented concern.  That's a character- or world-oriented concern.  You are willing to risk story for a greater concern.  That's the hierarchy that matters.

Not so -- part of the value of the story comes from the method by which it was created. The more risky the creation method, the more rewarding the creation of a high-quality end product.

For me, a story about a character overcoming incredible odds is more compelling if the odds really were incredible (in a real-life story) or if I felt they were (in a made up story).

RPGs allow a little bit of that to creep into otherwise made-up stories. By being rigorous about world fidelity, my enjoyment of the story is enhanced.

Quote from: John MorrowThat's simply a world-oriented way to produce a story-oriented trip down the tracks.  The odds are stacked in the PCs' favor to produce a story-like result.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but it's essentially another form of script immunity.

Hmm... well, it's not immunity in the sense of a guarantee of any kind; it is stacking the odds to produce a story-like result. But, again, there is no guarantee.

There's nothing no more nefarious here than saying, "This is a CR 3 level dungeon. You can be pretty sure there's not an Ancient Red dragon in the first room... but not *totally* sure... and if you get really unlucky against those kobolds, they'll still kill you."

Script immunity? You tell me -- but if that's the case, there's an awful lot of it going around out there... maybe immunity isn't what it used to be.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Keran

• Do you have a poll of published writers, showing what proportion of them know the end when they set out at the beginning?
• The existence of a single counterexample is sufficient to show that preplanned plot is not necessary to the successful execution of story.

With respect to a poll, no.  Do you?  With respect to a counter example, have I said that a pre-planned plot is necessary for the successful execution of a story or is that a convenient straw-man that you've set up to knock down?  I did say, "Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go? Sure, and it usually shows."

Quote from: KeranYou're apparently making an unsupported generalization based either on what you think ought to be true, or what works for you.  But I can't support it as a general principle of writing from my own knowledge, based on the reports of the published writers I listened to at rec.arts.sf.composition or at Forward Motion.

Actually, despite having a BA in English with a creative writing concentration, having read dozens of books on writing fiction, and having listened to many panels of authors and editors at conventions, I have a great deal of trouble writing fiction.  So if it's a personal bias, it's a bias based on knowing why writing fiction doesn't work for me and what a true absence of story concern looks like.

I'm basing my generalizations not only on what published authors said in books on writing and on convention panels but what editors who buy and reject fiction also say tends to work and tends to not work.  Perhaps your milage varies, but I've never run into the "sort of 'let the characters go' and 'see what happens.'" school of writing advice.  Have you?

Quote from: KeranPatricia C. Wrede also teaches writing and disagrees sharply with the notion that there is any One True Way to write: she's had a lot of experience seeing different writers succeed with different methods.  She's left an awful lot of evidence of this opinion behind in the archives.  I decline to accept a contrary opinion apparently based on an idea of how things ought to work, rather than the reports of writers' own experiences.

And that would be a useful critique if I were advocating One True Way to write.  Have I?  Go back and take a look at what I was originally objecting to.  Based on what you've learned from published writers, do you believe that:

Quote from: -E.But there's other ways to create virtually the same product -- and, in fact, they're used in domains other than RPGs. In both books and movies, story-creators (i.e. authors and directors) sort of "let the characters go" and "see what happens." In a lot of movies and books, the people in charge are "making it up as they go" to a very large extent.

...is an accurate assessment of things?

Quote from: John MorrowWith respect to a poll, no.  Do you?  With respect to a counter example, have I said that a pre-planned plot is necessary for the successful execution of a story or is that a convenient straw-man that you've set up to knock down?  I did say, "Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go? Sure, and it usually shows."

I'm kind of losing track of what you're arguing here...

I thought that, at first, you said that for something to be a "story" the people creating it had to know the ending in advance...

I can point you to an example (Apocoplyspe Now) of the people who created it saying they "had no idea how it would end."

You don't seem to trust them --  I'm inclined to take them at their word (maybe I missed the part where they said, "We knew how it'd end all along because we read the Conrad story").

But it's clear you weren't saying that it's *impossible* -- just that "it shows."

I guess you didn't like Apocolypse Now, huh?

I think it "shows" in a good way -- I assume that's not what you meant.

I don't have the credentials you do in terms of education or reading books about how to write; I've written short stories and novellas I'm happy with (doesn't take much to please me). More importantly, I've run a bunch of games where

1) I had no idea how they'd end.
2) The outcome was a hugely satisfying story that other players have written up as stories that were, in fact, interesting to people who had nothing to do with the game.

A scientific survey?
Of course not.

But evidence that this sort of thing can work? I'd hope so.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.I dunno man. The people involved said they "weren't sure how it would end." I tend to take them at their word. Even if, ultimately, the ending was similar to the one in the novel, that doesn't mean that they were sure to get there from the beginning.

Apocolypse Now was presented as an example of a story in which the ending was not pre-determined.

Well, the ending that was going to happen was that Willard was going to meet Kurtz.  In other words, the movie was going somewhere, even if the exact ending wasn't defined.  I would also suggest that even Coppola would agree it was a bad way to make a movie for a large number of reasons.

Quote from: -E.I could go on -- a lot of novels and films get started without the end in mind. Someone already stated S. King works that way.

I think it's not only possible -- or even plausible -- it's not even *uncommon.*

I never claimed that it wasn't possible or plausible, nor did I claim an author needed to work out the exact ending of a work before they go there (though Holly Lisle does suggest it can be done that way).  My claim is that  "let the characters go" and "see what happens" frequently doesn't work and, while there are exceptions, there are also plenty of disasters.

Rather than go round and round with anecdotal evidence that won't actually prove anything or play dueling experts, where we go back and forth quoting various experts on how best to write, I'll acknowledge that movies and books can be written by winging it and not having a specific ending in mind.   If you want to write that way, by all means don't let me stop you.  I'll simply suggest that if you keep writing stories that don't go anywhere and/or won't sell, that generally means you should try something different, but by all means get your advice from real authors, not me.

Quote from: -E.I think railroading is more about how the game is run than how the starting situation is described. Plenty of military games and stories deal with being given a mission -- I mean, virtually every Star Trek episode begins with the crew coming to a new planet... does that make those stories (when translated into games) railroads by definition?

I think that as role-playing games, they would feel pretty railroaded.  If you can't walk off of the adventure of avoid the major encounters, character choice is limited.

Quote from: -E.I don't think so -- ihere's my definition: f a player tries to take a not-predetermined course of action and is prevented by the GM, the game *might* be a railroad. If prevention happens in a way that the player considers "unfair" then it's definitely a railroad.

I think you are assuming that railroading is inherently bad, and thus are crafting a definition where it is.  I don't think that's the case.  I think some players enjoy railroaded games and all railroading is not inherently bad.

Quote from: -E.... maybe... but I doubt it. You can't look at finished piece of work and determine if was a railroad or not. Even by your definition.

You can often look back and see the tracks.  A railroad runs on tracks.  

Quote from: -E.How do you *know* that any potential railroad *relies* on the characters following the track?

By thinking about what would happen to the story or game if the character left the tracks.  Leaving the tracks of a railroad produces a disaster.

Quote from: -E.The concept of a railroad only applies to RPG's -- you can't really look at a book or movie and say, "that would be a railroad." And in an RPG, you can't know if it *was* a railroad unless you can point to the 'rails' being enforced.

Yes, I think you can look at a book or movie and say, "that would be a railroad."  For example, in Logan's Run, Logan and Jessica enter the runner's tunnel.  From that point until the point they reach the outside, the movie is a railroad.  They are in a tunnel that has only one way out and the "monster" they have to encounter between them and freedom.  Another example is the Poseidon Adventure (the original one) where the ship is upside-down and flooded and the characters have a particular path they need to take to get to the engine room and, it is presumed, freedom.

Perhaps the funniest example comes from the excellent cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender.  The team has a flying bison and can thus go wherever they want by flying.  There is an episode called The Cave of Two Lovers.  The characters hear about the cave but reject it, instead choosing to use their flying bison to fly where they want to go.  Cut to a scene of them being bombarded by fire nation fireballs in the air.  They come back, looking a bit crisp, and opt to try the cave.  Basically, the plot of the episode required them to go through the cave, which would normally not make any sense, since they have a flying bison.  So the writer shows them trying to fly and failing, to make sure they go through the cave that contains the adventure.

Basically, any time the characters have no control except maybe to go forward or refuse to go forward, it's a railroad.  It's on a track.  And you can see tracks even if the train doesn't try to jump them.

Quote from: -E.You're making assumptions that aren't warrented.

And I think you are, too.

Quote from: -E.Eh? It's all about the guarantee? Okay -- the we agree! There is no guarantee in roleplaying. There's no guarantee of a good story any time you set out on a creative endevor.

Correct.  But there are ways to improve the odds.  One can try to create a good story rather than being indifferent to the quality of the story.

Quote from: -E.I certainly never claimed there was one -- I only claimed

1) That good stories can and do happen
2) They happen with relative frequency if you set things up right

As I've said before -- the *absence* of a guarantee is, for me, a bonus.

I agree with all of that.  But as I mentioned before, the style conflict occurs when the GM or players purposely try to control story quality (or not).  There are some people who are not happy with "relative frequency".  So perhaps we are simply talking past each other here.

Quote from: -E.Not so -- part of the value of the story comes from the method by which it was created. The more risky the creation method, the more rewarding the creation of a high-quality end product.

I have no problem with that, but think that's something very different from what a lot of story-oriented games are trying to do.

Quote from: -E.For me, a story about a character overcoming incredible odds is more compelling if the odds really were incredible (in a real-life story) or if I felt they were (in a made up story).

RPGs allow a little bit of that to creep into otherwise made-up stories. By being rigorous about world fidelity, my enjoyment of the story is enhanced.

I don't disagree with that, either.  But the style conflict comes into play when the players realize that the "incredible odds" that their characters faced were never really incredible.  Should the characters really have a chance or dying or not?  There is no right answer to that and an answer that satisfies one player might ruin the game for another player, and vice versa.

Quote from: -E.Hmm... well, it's not immunity in the sense of a guarantee of any kind; it is stacking the odds to produce a story-like result. But, again, there is no guarantee.

Again, I think that's where the story/world line is drawn.  Do the GM, players, or mechanics have the ability to guarantee story-like results?

Quote from: -E.There's nothing no more nefarious here than saying, "This is a CR 3 level dungeon. You can be pretty sure there's not an Ancient Red dragon in the first room... but not *totally* sure... and if you get really unlucky against those kobolds, they'll still kill you."

But that's not necessarily natural, either.  

Quote from: -E.Script immunity? You tell me -- but if that's the case, there's an awful lot of it going around out there... maybe immunity isn't what it used to be.

I think you are talking about the middle ground between enforced story and story indifference.  That is, creating a story-rich environment and hoping a good story comes out of it.  I think that's a fine way to run a game.

The point I was trying to make is that the more the GM tries to guarantee story-like results, the more artificially story-like evens in the game might seem.  Making a dungeon very survivable is essentially creating a form of limited script immunity and the objective is the same and it can also feel artificial.  It's not exactly script immunity, but it can come very close.

Quote from: David RInteresting indeed. Correct me if I'm wrong but is it your contention that one of the shortcomings of "story" is that the player would be constrained by trying to keep within the perimeters of the story - or rather the story that is apparently being created?

I'm saying that if we're engaging in something like collaborative storytelling or authorship, then a player, as co-author, might reckon that a certain moment in the game is the right time for a plot complication, or a reversal or climax, and then act through the character to bring that about.

Or more likely, in a traditional RPG, the player will work with the GM, actively or passively, to cause those things to happen. Thus a player who's looking to collaboratively tell a "story" (in terms of a plot structure that the group likes) may overlook or even encourage the GM to stage-manage the action as play goes along so as to produce a "big, climactic scene" 90% of the way through a session. The player may also engage in certain dramatically-appropriate actions at key points in play, with the expectation that they'll be ratified by more or less overt GM judgment. Possibly fudging of the dice or rules, possibly a simple use of the GM discretionary power in areas that aren't explicitly covered by rules, such as NPC behavior.

Whereas if the players & GM are working from a paradigm of "set 'em up and let 'em fall"--prepping a scenario or campaign so that it presents an interesting, conflict-laden situation, and then "running" it almost like an experiment, they will be doing something quite different. Again, in a traditional RPG, the players will pursue their characters' interests and motivations as best they can given their characters' resources as represented and abstracted in the game, and the resulting collision of interests should hopefully yield an interesting game.

It's like comparing a sword fight between opponents who both want to win, and a "fight" between people who improvise a series of combat maneuvers and then decide, collaboratively, when to "end it with a bang" for the sake of the audience. The latter two might be very, very good at making it look real, but the experience of pretending to fight for the entertainment of an audience differs quite a bit from the experience of "really fighting" (even with rules).

Quote from: -E.I'm kind of losing track of what you're arguing here...

Are you losing track of what I'm arguing or what people think I'm arguing?

Quote from: -E.I thought that, at first, you said that for something to be a "story" the people creating it had to know the ending in advance...

No.  I suggested that when writing a story, it was better to know the ending in advance.  I even said, in that first post, "Do books get written and movies get made where the author makes it up as they go? Sure, and it usually shows."  I'm not sure how that gets transformed into your summary.

Quote from: -E.I can point you to an example (Apocoplyspe Now) of the people who created it saying they "had no idea how it would end."

I think we have a different definition by what it means by knowing how it would end.  I think that knowing that Willard will meet Kurtz is essentially "knowing how it will end".  I think you are thinking in terms of how that final encounter turns out.  I think we are likely just talking past each other.

Quote from: -E.You don't seem to trust them --  I'm inclined to take them at their word (maybe I missed the part where they said, "We knew how it'd end all along because we read the Conrad story").

I don't believe what seems to be your interpretation because their model was a particular book that has a specific ending and they were shooting based on a script, even if they were rivising it while they were shooting.

Quote from: -E.But it's clear you weren't saying that it's *impossible* -- just that "it shows."

I said, "it usually shows".  

Quote from: -E.I guess you didn't like Apocolypse Now, huh?

I think it "shows" in a good way -- I assume that's not what you meant.

I thought it was over-rated but not bad.  I also think it's atypical, which makes it a poor example.  

Quote from: -E.I don't have the credentials you do in terms of education or reading books about how to write; I've written short stories and novellas I'm happy with (doesn't take much to please me).

My "credentials" aren't really worth anything.  I mentioned them originally to explain the source of my opinions and later simply to point out that I know I'm missing someting.  If you've written short stories and novellas that you are happy with, you are already ahead of me when it comes to successfully writing fiction.

The main reason why I said anything that there are a lot of people who write but never get to a point or produce a sellable story.  Many people expect plots to happen automatically and for many of them, they don't.  It probably would have been better if I had said, "And if that doesn't work for you, you should try..." rather than saying it doesn't work.

Quote from: -E.More importantly, I've run a bunch of games where

1) I had no idea how they'd end.
2) The outcome was a hugely satisfying story that other players have written up as stories that were, in fact, interesting to people who had nothing to do with the game.

A scientific survey?
Of course not.

But evidence that this sort of thing can work? I'd hope so.

And I didn't claim that it couldn't.  But did you simply "let the characters go" and "see what happens" or was there a little more to it than that?

Quote from: MarcoI don't buy that the experiences aren't all that important.

I didn't say that the experiences weren't important.  I said that "the details of the actual experiences didn't matter all that much."  Not the same thing at all.

Quote from: Marco1. They are important to the audience (at least this audience member) as part of "the story." They, amongst other things, illuminate character and setting.
2. They would be important to me as a player in an RPG (from an immersed standpoint and making decisions about how I view right and wrong or at least who my character is).

Correct.  But I can think of dozens of scenes that could illuminate the character and setting and so on and select any half-dozen to get the point across.  It isn't the specifics that are important.

Quote from: MarcoI think I would be able to "hold story quality as a concern" and still accept a poor story the same way I'm willing to hold "getting out of the dungeon alive" as a concern and still accept a TPK.

Correct.  But then it's not a primary concern and you have other concerns that you are interested in supporting.  A player for whom "getting out of the dungeon alive" is a primary concern may expect the GM to fudge to keep their character live.  All games contain a hierarchy of different concerns.  What determines the style of a game is which concerns win when two conflict with each other.

Quote from: MarcoI'd accept a bad story. It makes the cool storys that much richer, IMO.

I personally agree.  Not everyone does, which is why you have people designing games to guarantee good or at least passable stories.

Quote from: MarcoDoes this make all dungeons railroads? After all, there's a series of rooms and the players can't get to some without going through others?

A linear dungeon is essentially a railroad.  See that recent thread about dungeon maps.  Count the tracks.  If there is only one, it's a railroad.

Quote from: MarcoDoes this make Dogs in the Vinyard a railroad since the PCs are pointed at a town and instructed to uncover the sin and judge it?

In some ways, it is.  If not railroaded, it's certainly limited in scope.  Isn't that one of the critiques that RPGPundit and others make about it?

Quote from: MarcoI mean, if so, then some huge percent of RPG-play seems to fall into this category. It seems that if in each encounter along the way, the player gets to make a choice that is meaningful to them (either as an audience member thinking it's interesting that he doesn't take the girls or surf or as an invested player--deciding not to give back the surfboard) then gets to decide what to do at the end (join up or kill the target)--I don't see how that's more railroady than a dungeon or Dogs play.

I think all of those things can be railroady to some degree.  If the player can't avoid the stations, then they are on a train.

Quote from: MarcoAgain, my problem here is with *guarantee*--that seems like playing D&D where you *guarantee* that everyone will survive and get rich and level up because that's what someone has decided the 'goal of the game' is.

I've played D&D games like that.  Not my cup of tea, but they do exist.  And some people do like it that way, just like people who play video games with cheat codes and god modes.

Quote from: MarcoI think there's a big difference in script immunity and favorable odds (of course depending on "how favorable"). Certainly taking the chance-of-death down to a fairly low level will tend to produce a low-death game ... but lots of games and systems (Hero) are fairly low fatality at most power-levels.

Correct.  But as the risk of death approaches zero, it becomes essentially script immunity.

Well, I guess I fundamentally disagree about what a "railroad" is. I do see Dogs as "limited in scope" but I do not see it as a *railroad* (that is, I understand the complaint and find it valid for what it is--Dogs is not a game where you would do much but play Dogs--but I would not use the term railroad to describe it).

For example:
1. The player (let's say, in a dungeon or spy game) comes to the table knowing there will be a mission and they will go to solve it. If the player is complicit and understands this correctly then it isn't dysfunctional (IMO, a key point of railroading). In any event, there is agreement and I think that distinguishes it from being something "the GM is doing."

2. If I ran a super-spy game and the player made a spy and then refused to go on the mission, I would tend to stop the game and talk with them: what went wrong? Was the mission 'bad?' Were they expecting something radically different--where was the misscommunication?

If it turned out that they were just exercising their player-power to ditch the mission and do something else, I would consider that breach of contract (same as if I sat down to play a super-spy game and the GM teleported me to a fantasy land and I felt baited-and-switched).

3. I haven't read the dungeon map thread (although I'll look) but I would say that if we consider a dungeon, where the PCs set the pace and where the solutions to the various areas are their own to invent (and reasonably adjudicated by the GM) then the term loses some meaning.

If a standard dungeon is a railroad then I'm not sure I see a difference between "railroading" and "GMing."

But we can use the term to mean whatever we like. I'm fine with having the GM throw situation at me. I'm not fine if the GM mandates how it'll turn out. I'm not fine if the GM ensures that situation A will *always* lead to situation B--but if the adventure (the context) has me going down a river where B is further down than A, and I don't leave the river, say, and go on foot, that seems pretty fair to me.

So we can call that river railroading (or an adventure where the PCs climb a mountain, say)--but then we need another term to describe the GM seizing control of the PCs actions or nullifying their decisions (i.e. the PCs decide, weirdly, to go down the river, back the way they came and *still* run into the next situation even though it was wasn't there when they came that way).

If you want to use words for those events other than railroading then, for purposes of this conversation, we can certainly discuss those.

-Marco

Quote from: Elliot WilenI'm saying that if we're engaging in something like collaborative storytelling or authorship, then a player, as co-author, might reckon that a certain moment in the game is the right time for a plot complication, or a reversal or climax, and then act through the character to bring that about.

Or more likely, in a traditional RPG, the player will work with the GM, actively or passively, to cause those things to happen. Thus a player who's looking to collaboratively tell a "story" (in terms of a plot structure that the group likes) may overlook or even encourage the GM to stage-manage the action as play goes along so as to produce a "big, climactic scene" 90% of the way through a session. The player may also engage in certain dramatically-appropriate actions at key points in play, with the expectation that they'll be ratified by more or less overt GM judgment. Possibly fudging of the dice or rules, possibly a simple use of the GM discretionary power in areas that aren't explicitly covered by rules, such as NPC behavior.

But surely this is an example of a certain kind of playstyle, right? A playstyle which is more collaborative in nature. Most gamers use the traditional set up in your post to achieve achieve similar more random results. I mean to me it's seems that some gamers (the more collaborative ones) want to know how the story ends or to overtly participate in it's creation and for others they want to see where it's going.At the end of the day, both produce a story, just using different methods.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: John MorrowI personally am coming to the table with one very simple assumption -- that there are good stories and bad stories.  That assessment doesn't even need to be objective.  It can be entirely subjective for every participant.  It could include a plot-driven pacing-centered idea of what a good story, which is what  I think most people think of when they think of the aesthetics of story, or it could include any of the other things that you talk about -- the desire toe explore certain ideas, imagery, theme, language, adventure, humor, a particular character, and so on.  But, ultimately, it's a desire for a specific result.

Yes.

QuoteWhen a human being is given a choice and selects choices that they think will produce something good or avoids choices that they think will produce something bad, it creates a pattern that is not natural, because nature don't care about a good story or a bad story.  The aesthetic filter that gets applied leaves a  pattern in what passes through it.  The more the filter is used, the more obvious it's mark will generally be.

What if the specific result I want is "What would really happen if I dropped this conflicted character into this situation"?

Now you, or any other person, might not enjoy the results of my trying to tell that particular story.  You may think it aesthetically unsatisfying, or an actively bad story to the point where it's no story at all.  It doesn't necessarily follow that I won't enjoy it as a story, or that I can't reasonably expect or intend to enjoy it as a story when I know that that method often works.

The stories I create that I find least satisfactory are the ones where, for one reason or another, I have failed to portray the characters or the setting in the manner that I think is true to them.

If I believe on a subconscious level that the obstacles that the setting has presented are not real -- if the setting and the antagonists are not behaving the way I subconsciously believe they really ought to be behaving -- then so far as this is the case, the story is drained of force.  I don't tend to find over-the-top action movies with highly cinematic action as suspenseful as movies in which the threats to the characters are more realistic, for instance: I have more of a sense that the peril cannot be real, and neither will the hero's inevitably over-the-top response be.

Similarly, to the extent that I don't believe that a character is responding the way they would really behave, the story is drained of force.  The implausible is not suspenseful or dramatic.  I might think that a character's action is unbelievable for anyone in the same circumstance -- say, if I see a trained combatant doing something tactically preposterous because the director thinks it looks flashy.  Or I might think that it merely doesn't fit the particular character -- say, when I started to write my verse narrative and developed the sense that no way in hell would the character as he was developing take the action I had ascribed to him for the reason I had him doing it.  A story is an artistic failure to me to the extent that my suspension of disbelief goes sproing!

QuoteIn other words, when you intentionally set out to produce a certain effect, that intent can leave a noticeable trace.  It doesn't have to be as heavy handed as railroading or script immunity.  It can even be more about what doesn't happen than what does -- for example, if the players never simply stumble into the solution to a problem without having to work for it.  If the GM intentionally sets out to create a good story, no matter what that means, it will determine how the game plays out.  In other words, if you are trying to intentionally tell stories, either you can manipulate what happens to produce good stories or you can be indifferent to quality, unless you believe that good stories are always an inevitable outcome of any sequence of events.

You've omitted a possibility.

I can set up in a fashion that often, but not invariably, produces results I enjoy as stories, and play it out naturally from there.  You may think the result is a bad story -- and it will be, at least in the sense that it will be very first draftish, since we don't often revise in this medium.  But I may find that the very real risk that the characters will fail -- or that the problem I pose will turn out not to have any solution at all -- is worth its weight in platinum: it's real suspense, not the sleight-of-pen that an author has to perform to try to keep a reader bothering to turn the pages in a genre in which the characters aren't allowed to crack up irrevocably.

QuoteFor example, if the story goal you have is to see how a character copes with a built-in conflict, you will likely avoid any situations where another character or external event resolves the conflict for the character because that will rob you of experiencing the story you want to experience. If you apply a filter that prevents the conflict from being taken away from character or resolved in a mundane way though an external flow of events in the story outside of the character's control, then ever time you apply that filter, it leaves behind the mark of intent.  Often, that mark is not noticeable in isolation, but the more frequently the filter is applied, the more of a mark it leaves behind and the more likely it will be noticed.

That's why part of setup is constructing situations in which I'm not likely to have to do things like that.  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.

QuoteThe reason why people discuss your "Platonic Ideal of the Story" that "seems to involve a lot of action falling into patterns that are not too probable, not very likely to happen naturally" is that this is a very clear way of illustrating the application of a filter and how it is noticeable.  It's easier to notice script immunity in a violent game than it is to notice subtle shifts in NPC behavior to keep them from stepping on a PC's built-in conflicts.  But that doesn't mean that it's not possible to notice more subtle patterns, especially over the course of many games and a long "campaign".

Sure.  But you're talking to someone whose major characters have sometimes reacted in a fashion in which, OOCly, I would greatly have preferred that they had not reacted.  And I let them do it.  The reason I let them do it is that they were true reactions, and there is no action as undesirable in a story as rendering a main character a hollow shell by falsifying their reactions.

I've been known to play badly, to misplay a character by mistake; but the Prime Directive is never, ever, ever intentionally to utter a falsehood about any character or the setting.

When I create things, I try to create things that are interesting, and that will fit together in particular ways; but once they're "really" there, they're sacrosanct.  If I know how the NPC should react based on their nature, that's what's going to happen.

QuoteWould any of those books have been as successful if they didn't have a good plot?

At least two of them had a plot that was, to my mind, bad in spots.  I would have preferred a good plot all the way through.

QuoteThat a story does other things well and can capture your attention in other ways does not mean that the fundamentals of plot, pacing, and so forth are not very important.  You don't need the climax of North by Northwest to have a good story but the absence of any climax or plot structure is going to leave most people going, "Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?"

I have found that managing to play through to the point where at least one of the significant conflicts on the table is resolved makes for a satisfactory plot, at least in my eyes.

QuoteThe simulation == !story was developed to explain why David Berkman's game Theatrix, which was heavily plot-oriented to the point where it was heavily influenced by Syd Field's books on screenplay plotting, didn't appeal to some of the regulars on rec.games.frp.advocacy.  That's why the language and focus deals with that distinction.  It does a very poor job of making distinctions between various types of story concerns and, as theory that revolves around resolution techniques, it does a very poor job of speaking toward set-up concerns such as setting up story-rich characters or settings, even if no sense of story actually gets forced during the game.

Indeed.  And in practice, I've been playing with another rgf.advocate, and we discovered that our typical language tends to be somewhat misleading: I flatly refuse to admit that a good story is necessarily false to the characters and the setting and have always hedged enough to sound significantly dramatist, and his descriptions of his style have always sounded more simulationist.  In practice it works out the other way around: my campaigns are simmy as hell and his have a heck of a lot more conscious production of plot tension, etc.

QuoteDo you agree that the natural actions of the character may not produce a good story?

... Do I?

Well, broadly, given what I think you probably mean: you're thinking of fitting the character into a particular campaign, right?  And there are certainly characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular campaigns -- I retired one before he even got into play once, when I realized what his probable reaction to the other characters would be, given what he knew and the way one of them was behaving.  There are characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular stories, or particular sorts of stories.

What there probably aren't is very many characters about whom no story can satisfactorily be told.  Most people have conflicts they either resolve, or decisively fail to resolve.

QuoteYou also might not wind up telling an interesting story.  Is it possible that the way the character copes with their build-in conflict is boring or simply not terribly interesting?  And if you find yourself telling a story that's not terribly compelling for others to read, do you adjust your character, their build-in conflict, or events in the story or do you just let it go because you enjoyed the exploration of the character as a writer and don't care if the result is a story that other people would enjoy reading?

Disclaimer: I don't write for publication often because I hate the business end of writing, but I have sold stories to minor markets, and there are a few of characters I wrote purely for commercial purposes.  And they're not "real."  They're written the way they are purely to produce an effect.  Some of them are shadows of "real" characters who're hanging around in my head, and whom I may write or play some day.  This isn't my usual approach, though, and I don't like writing this way well enough to keep it up, even though I succeeded at it, I suppose.  Aside from these cases ...

If I'm bored with the way the character copes with conflict, I'm not going to finish the story.  So far I haven't had that happen, though -- boredom tends to be a sign of mis-structuring the story so that what was interesting about the character in the first place isn't what I end up writing about.  Aside from that, mostly I think that presenting a conflict in an interesting manner is a matter of skill.

If I think the reader is likely to be bored with the way the character addresses an interesting conflict, it means there's a fault in my presentation that I should try to fix.

I adjust the character, or try to, if I have the sense that I haven't gotten some important thing about the character right.  Sometimes this involves a lot of thrashing around -- for instance, it took me ten years to figure out why one of my characters took an apparently out-of-character action I was convinced he'd actually taken.

I don't adjust the character or the built-in conflict in any way to fit the plot, because the point is to tell the story of the character I'm interested in, not to relate a particular plot.

QuoteIt is possible that your purpose isn't to write a story?  Is it possible that even after you develop your "writing chops", the character will not be compelling?  Are you writing to tell a story to others or are you writing to explore a character as an author?  You seem to assume that what you are doing will eventually work the way you intend.  Why are you so certain that this character addressing their built-in conflict will be an interesting story, no matter how it plays out?

Well, I may be defeated in writing the story.  I did intend to write one, though.

I think this series of questions just told me something that may be important to why I'm not satisfied with it.  The raw series of events could easily make an adventure story, with the main character making a crucial decision to undertake a courageously suicidal act.  It looks like the story ought to be structured around that choice; a typical story would be structured around that choice -- but it's a cheat.  It's a fake dilemma, in the sense that it's never really in doubt.  I could try to make it look that way -- but I know he's going to do it, and so (I think) does he.  Told this way, the plot is hollow; nothing turns on what's supposed to be the pivot point.

 (The character's actions aren't hollow.  The actions are bloody heroic.)

I started out knowing what state the character is in after the whole thing is over, but I didn't know how he got there -- he's not the kind of person you'd normally expect to end up that way.  So it's exploration, yes, in the sense that I want the right answer.  At this point, I think I know pretty well what the sequence of events was.

... I think there's a good chance that what's wrong with it is that I need to cast the story as what it is to me -- the unravelling to a mystery.  It's not immediately obvious how to do that, but nothing about this thing has been obvious.

This is probably why I can't figure out how to write the next scenes,  It's the alleged pivot point coming up, and the way I've been thinking of it, it just won't cut it.

Later: No.  That's not it.  I know what's going on.

This work actually exists in the setting, and is being written in third person omniscient by one of the characters in it.  And she doesn't think she's writing about the character I meant to write as the main character.  She's writing about the disastrous magical storm and what it was like, to explain it to younger family members who weren't around for it.  So of course the way I thought I was going to finish it doesn't work.

Thanks for those questions.  You just solved a problem I've been getting nowhere with for months.

QuoteDo you care about the story quality of the end result or not?  If, for example, you reach a point where the way the character deals with their built-in conflict just isn't interesting, do you change the conflict, change the character, or simply live with the result because you accomplished your goal?

I care passionately, which is why I'm still working on it seven years later.  Some individual scenes are very good, even excellent, but the overall structure is not good.  Which I mean to fix if it takes me the rest of my life.   (Which it may.)

QuoteThe issue with story is not necessarily pre-planning.  It's about the intentional manipulation of events in a game toward a certain story-like end.  And that's what all of those techniques are for.  If those issues didn't have to be managed and manipulated by an author to produce a good story, then they wouldn't be such important writing techniques.  And applying those techniques to filter what can and can't happen in a game or story can leave a noticeable footprint.

Most of them, except intentional plot manipulation, don't have to change what happens away from natural development, though.

Quote from: John MorrowI'm basing my generalizations not only on what published authors said in books on writing and on convention panels but what editors who buy and reject fiction also say tends to work and tends to not work.  Perhaps your milage varies, but I've never run into the "sort of 'let the characters go' and 'see what happens.'" school of writing advice.  Have you?

Some quotes from Stephen King sound very like that, as I recall.  Since I haven't nead his entire book, however, I don't want to represent it as the whole of his advice.  I've certainly heard it discussed as one of numerous approaches in r.a.sf.c.

QuoteAnd that would be a useful critique if I were advocating One True Way to write.  Have I?  Go back and take a look at what I was originally objecting to.  Based on what you've learned from published writers, do you believe that:

QuoteBut there's other ways to create virtually the same product -- and, in fact, they're used in domains other than RPGs. In both books and movies, story-creators (i.e. authors and directors) sort of "let the characters go" and "see what happens." In a lot of movies and books, the people in charge are "making it up as they go" to a very large extent.

...is an accurate assessment of things?

I never had any interest in writing screenplays and haven't read anything on the subject, so I couldn't say there.  The only movie I know of from other sources where it wasn't clear which ending they were going to use well into the making of it is Casablanca.  Not my department.

As far as rules for writing stories go: they're products.  Nobody's selling the process; they're selling a manuscript.

One published writer to another:

Quotepwrede6...@aol.com (PWrede6492) writes:
>In article , p...@gw.dd-b.net (Pamela Dean
>Dyer-Bennet) writes:
>>It's not useful advice for everybody and it is generally so presented.
>There does not seem to be *any* writing advice that works for
>*everybody*, all of the time.  Except maybe "Get words on paper
>somehow."
>Hmmm -- have we finally found a writing generalization that really
>*does* hold?

Only if "paper" is metaphorical.  Some writers write on the computer
and email their stuff in.  [ducking]

I can assuredly dig up more specific comments on outlining, knowing the end of the story before you start writing, and so on, but not tonight: I'm up too late already.

Quote from: JimBobOzAnd here we see therpgsite starting to look like The Forge. Long, detailed posts splitting fine semantic hairs, with an excess of courtesy, "Because you are a poor writer and I'm a worse reader, you seem to be saying X. Given that, I say Y. Of course I may have misunderstood and I'm terribly sorry if I have." Plus that annoying affectation of writing posts like emails. "Dear Bob... blahblah... Love Jim."

I thought this was going to be a place of simple, plain and clear speech?

Thank you for saying it. The first handful of posts were all right by me, but now my eyes glaze over and I lose time when I try to read the rest. Guess this stuff still isn't for me. Either that or I was abducted by aliens.

For the folks out there, I'd just take Settimbrini's original argument as a good idea to take home: Story in RPGs is a subjective experience and the methods by which those experiences can be offered often entail limiting freedom of player action.

Quote from: John MorrowThe point I was trying to make is that the more the GM tries to guarantee story-like results, the more artificially story-like evens in the game might seem.  Making a dungeon very survivable is essentially creating a form of limited script immunity and the objective is the same and it can also feel artificial.  It's not exactly script immunity, but it can come very close.

I think I was missing this;

It's a good point and I agree with it -- once someone (players can do it also) starts trying to guarantee a given result, it's going to damage the experience for me.

I'd rather see things fall apart completely than have the GM manipulate the game to make a "story" happen.

That's why I think setup and communication before the game starts are so important -- if the game is pointed in the right direction (meaning a direction all the players, GM-inclusive, agree on) and the characters are designed to work well with it, IME there's a good chance you'll get a story-like result from any set of player decisions, short of decisions intentionally designed to end the game.

In my experience there's more successes than failures --but I generally play with groups that communicate well and trust each other.

I think your take on rail-roading was interesting;

My take

1) Railroading has pretty bad connotations. I dislike any definition where someone could say, "I was railroaded -- it was nice."

I'm not claiming I have the power to write the dictionary definition, but I think most folks would find a positive use counter-intuitive.

2) I don't think you can "look back" (or forward) and "see the tracks." You can't really know if a game is a railroad unless you're stopped from trying to do something you "ought" to be able to do.

Your example of characters who are forced to go into a cave rather than flying over it -- that *could* be a railroad. In an RPG game, if the GM told me, "You try flying, but you take... (roll roll)... 8 points of damage and return home, wiser for it." I'd consider that a textbook railroad.

But let's look at another case -- lthere's a classic example from Lord of the Rings, that' I'm going to crib: Frodo (a PC in this case) says, "The hell with this quest crap. I know Gandalf has giant eagles. We ride one over Mt. Doom. I drop the ring in. We're back in the Shire by late afternoon."

The GM considers: "Well, there's the all-seeing eye; if you're up in the sky -- without cover -- the odds of you being seen are *much* higher than if you carry the ring above ground. And the Nazgul fly on these worm/dragon things... your odds of making a High-Altitude approach without being detected are low... say, one in fifty. If you *are* detected, Nazgul fly faster than Giant Eagles... your odds of not-being intercepted are very low, indeed."

Is *that* a railroad?

Harder to say; I don't think so. It's more of a gray area. I think it's *reasonable* for the GM to set up a situation where a PC's approach might not work...

For me, it would be a matter of what I expect from the world. Presumably Sauron, Gandalf and Elron are all pretty smart guys who are knowledgeable of their own capabilities and their enemies.

It's *unlikely* that they would overlook an easy, low-risk way of destroying the Ring of Power. As a player in a LoTR game, I wouldn't consider it unreasonable if the GM ruled that the Eagle approach was near-unto-suicide.

All of this is YMMV -- and a *lot* of it would depend on the "vibe" I got from the GM. If I got a "You're wrecking my beautiful story" vibe no amount of solid explanation would convince me that it wasn't a railroad... but absent that vibe calls like the one I described above strike me as completely fair and evidence of a free, not-railroaded game.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.But let's look at another case -- lthere's a classic example from Lord of the Rings, that' I'm going to crib: Frodo (a PC in this case) says, "The hell with this quest crap. I know Gandalf has giant eagles. We ride one over Mt. Doom. I drop the ring in. We're back in the Shire by late afternoon."

The GM considers: "Well, there's the all-seeing eye; if you're up in the sky -- without cover -- the odds of you being seen are *much* higher than if you carry the ring above ground. And the Nazgul fly on these worm/dragon things... your odds of making a High-Altitude approach without being detected are low... say, one in fifty. If you *are* detected, Nazgul fly faster than Giant Eagles... your odds of not-being intercepted are very low, indeed."

Is *that* a railroad?

Harder to say; I don't think so. It's more of a gray area. I think it's *reasonable* for the GM to set up a situation where a PC's approach might not work...

I'd say no, taken by itself it isn't a railroad.  It could be as part of a larger whole though.  If the GM has decided ahead of time "The only thing that will work is following Gollum through the cave of Shelob and making their way overland."  If every other plan is shot down except the one the GM has in mind, then it's a railroad.

Even if there's more than one plan, to me the GM forcing his solution is the railroad.  Even if he's selected 2 or more acceptable solutions to the problem, that's not free choice that's a railroad with a switching station.

Yeah, I don't think that saying "This approach isn't within the scope of what we're doing," is necessarily a railroad.

Before any restrictions get put on the game there are an infinite number of choices available to the players.  Frodo could eat the ring.  He could stick it in a cereal box and stuff it in a shipment of identical cereal boxes and hope for the best.  He could ally with Sauron.

Part of the job of both the GM and the players is to trim away some of those choices.  Sauron doesn't make allies.  Hobbits don't have cereal boxes (though ... why? ... nevermind).  The ring would give you extreme sour tummy.

The question is not (to my mind) how many choices are trimmed away.  The question is how many remain.

Not to get all mathematical (since, really, the math of infinity is loopy anyway) but you can take away an infinite number of choices and still leave people with infinite choices or you can take away an infinite number of choices and leave people with only a finite number remaining.

You can say "All the ways that you could deal with this other than getting the ring to Mount Doom are closed off ... but all the infinite ways that you could manage to get to Mount Doom and all the good and bad you can do yourselves and others on the way is still wide open."

Or you can say "All the ways that you could deal with this other than recapping the original Tolkien story are closed off.  Your only choice now is the unalterable railroad."

Like I said ... it's not so much what's taken away as what remains available.  So if you can systematically say "We are going to forbid all the things that would fail to make a good story, which we shall define as X, Y and Z" and that still leaves an infinite number of really good stories in your potential arsenal ... and you then tell one such story through emerging play ... well then, you've just guaranteed story without the railroad, right?

Now whether you can systematically define X, Y and Z in that way is more of a controversial question, I expect.  But I think you can, so there you are as far as I'm concerned. :D

Quote from: MaddmanI'd say no, taken by itself it isn't a railroad.  It could be as part of a larger whole though.  If the GM has decided ahead of time "The only thing that will work is following Gollum through the cave of Shelob and making :cool: their way overland."  If every other plan is shot down except the one the GM has in mind, then it's a railroad.

Even if there's more than one plan, to me the GM forcing his solution is the railroad.  Even if he's selected 2 or more acceptable solutions to the problem, that's not free choice that's a railroad with a switching station.

I agree.

Here's what I would recommend if I were going to GM this: I'd spend some time thinking about both side's capabilities and objectives. My goal would be to play both Sauron and Elron/Gandalf as extremely intelligent adversaries.

Both understand the capabilities of the other--Sauron knows what Gandalf's magic can and cannot accomplish. He knows what the elves can do. He knows how to run intelligence and search/destroy operations in Elf Territory, etc.

The good guys have the same level of understanding -- they know how easy/hard The Ring is to spot. They know that Sauron's minions are deadly, powerful, and fast. etc.

If I start with the assumption that there's no easy way into Mordor, but that it's not *impossible* then we have the foundation for the game.

If I were running the game, I wouldn't be satisfied unless I was able to come up with a variety of "ways in" that I thought were viable -- not so that there would be multiple "switching stations," but to assure myself that I hadn't limited the game into one narrow plot.

But clearly getting into Mordor is difficult and one thing the good guys *don't* know is how to get through the almost-impassable mountains.

Thus enters Gollum. Gollum's not the only way in, but he's probably the good guy's best chance.

So long as there are other ways in, I think this is *fair* -- e.g. not-a-rail-road.

This is risky territory though -- any time there's one-best-way and the other ways "suck" that's reasonably close to rail-road territory.

Still, both real-life and a lot of fiction have situations with narrow sets of good options. I don't think that situation -- by itself -- creates a railroad.

I probably wouldn't be happy with the game until I'd worked out other viable scenarios -- and I'd make sure I was open to improvisation during the game. I rarely think, "Wow! Wouldn't it be cool if X, then Y, then Z..." but if I'm thinking that way, it's a good sign I'm attached to a certain plot or outcome.

If I were running the game, I'd probably position Valamir as a credible, alternative to Gollum -- he and his men probably know enough about Mordor to be able to get the Hobbit's in.

Traveling with them would have it's own set of risks (they'd go after the Ring pretty quickly), but it would be a different set of risks from the ones encountered in the story.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: TonyLBYeah, I don't think that saying "This approach isn't within the scope of what we're doing," is necessarily a railroad.

.....

Now whether you can systematically define X, Y and Z in that way is more of a controversial question, I expect.  But I think you can, so there you are as far as I'm concerned. :D

Well said; I think you're right to express these as relative infinities -- so long as an infinite number of possibilities remain, it's not a railroad.

I'm intrigued by what you mean "systematically."

Cheers,
-E.

Oh, I just mean "in a way that's thought out and communicated to everyone."

I suppose you could do it unconsciously or unilaterally, but that strikes me as a risky proposition.

And, like I said, there may well be folks who say "It's just not possible to figure out how to do that and communicate it in advance!  It's artistry, and must occur in the passion of the moment."  And I respect that point of view, while personally disagreeing.

Quote from: TonyLBYeah, I don't think that saying "This approach isn't within the scope of what we're doing," is necessarily a railroad.

Snip

I think I agree with everything in this post!

Cool!

-Marco

On fiction and railroading (a general reply to a lot of posts):

As to the LotR thing--analyzing traditional fiction in the mode of an RPG is difficult at best--and you have to make all kinds of assumptions that have to be stated up front or, IME, you get into trouble very fast (i.e. "Frodo is a PC").

In the LotR scenario, there is so much ... pressure ... on Frodo that he has very, very few good choices and many of his options and assetts get reduced as time goes by (he loses his friends, he can't just throw the ring in a river--he has to bear it--and getting into Mordor requires *someone's* help).

In many ways it might not make for a good, open ended scenario, even assuming the GM just "set it up and played it fair" (i.e. the GM may not know *every inch* of the mountain passes around Mordor but has established they are nearly impassable making Gollum's route an almost necessary oddity).

That said, I am not sure I would consider such a one-way scenario a railroad either. And this is where we get philosophical.

I think that the process of railroading in traditional RPGs centers around the GM acting, intentionally, to remove player agency for meta-game reasons. that is, the PC does/is trying to do something and the GM either stops it or warps the world so as to nullify it--for reasons that do not have to do with "internal cause" (what would 'most likely' happen).

In a more iffy case, the GM might modify the world so as to impact the results of player input so as to alter but not nullify it. An example of this would be making something a player does either a hugely dramatic failure (if a regular failure would be internal-cause driven) or a hugely dramatic success (if a regular success seemed warranted).

In cases like these, I tend to think that even though 'drama' (or maybe 'story') is the meta-game concern, it is likely not railroading if the convention of the game would be reasonably seen to include any kind of cinematic license (which I think many, many games do).

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoIn a more iffy case, the GM might modify the world so as to impact the results of player input so as to alter but not nullify it. An example of this would be making something a player does either a hugely dramatic failure (if a regular failure would be internal-cause driven) or a hugely dramatic success (if a regular success seemed warranted).

In cases like these, I tend to think that even though 'drama' (or maybe 'story') is the meta-game concern, it is likely not railroading if the convention of the game would be reasonably seen to include any kind of cinematic license (which I think many, many games do).

-Marco

This is an interesting discussion and a good point here.

We agree, if I read you correctly, that games should be driven by internal cause (I used the word "fair"), and that the GM should base decisions on "what should happen."

There's always a gray area though. Since the GM will never have enough information about the world to always know what "should" happen, inevitably the GM will end up having to make judgement calls.

Example: Frodo and (later) Sam fight Shelob outside of her lair. Somewhere nearby there is an Orc patrol. What are the odds that the Orcs will show up right at the most dramatic moment (just as Sam is about to lament Frodo's "death"?)

Let's say that the GM has already established some facts:

1) There's an Orc watch tower right by the opening to her cave
2) Orcs patroll the area regularly and are aware that there are (sometimes) tasty loot to be had by her cave, and always check it out

This, by itself, doesn't tell us what the odds are. Ideally the GM would have provided some further rules to help run Orc-patrol encounters. If I were running LoTR in D20, I would stat out Mordor in the following ways

A) Odds of hitting a patrol near a watch tower (say, about 1 in 3 for each hour spent in the tower's immediate vicinity; a single roll on a single passage through)
B) Rules for Orcs making spot checks against PCs hiding in the rocks
C) Some notes on how the Orcs will react (e.g. they won't alert HQ or call for re-enforcements unless the opposition looks overwhelming; they'd prefer to keep the loot for themselves)
D) Rules for the PC's hearing the Orcs coming (e.g. as chaotic, undisciplined troops, you'll hear them babbling away and fighting with each other long before they're actually in sight, with a DC 10 Listen check).

Given these rules, I'd roll for an encounter at some point when the characters emerge from the cave...

But that still doesn't provide the key answer: exactly *when* do the Orcs arrive? Are they waiting at the cave entrance? Do they show up 1d20 combat rounds after the PC's emerge (meaning, possibly, durring the fight?) Do they come right after the fight?

Even with a *lot* of information, there's still an element of GM discretion.

I think that, within that small area of ambiguity, it's allowable to make a decision based on what's best for the story (e.g. have the Orc patrol arrive after the fight, before Frodo wakes up...)

Small things like dramatic timing can make a big difference -- and so long as the GM is committed to fairness and doesn't have an overarching agenda I have no problem with making the Dramatist call in a small gray area.

Cheers,
-E.

I'm glad to see things going in this direction. What Marco's just pointed to, the GM "removing player agency for meta-game reasons" is what I'd like to call "motivated GMing". And generally I wouldn't call it railroading unless there's a conflict between the GM's motive and the player's interest. It's a social problem, not a matter of mechanics or technique.

The concept of "motivated GMing" is in contrast to what I'd like to call "neutral GMing", which is where the GM essentially judges things according to cause-and-effect based on known starting conditions, fixed causal rules, stochastic models, and any alterations introduced by the PCs' (their "agency"). -E's example above is "neutral" right up to the point where he accepts a bit of dramatic timing in the appearance of the Orcs. That may or may not work for a given group. But it's indisputably an example of the use of GM discretion in the service of a meta-game concern: dramatic timing. Arguably if everyone wanted even less "drama", the GM could continue to work from a "neutral" standard by rolling the d20 for timing, or by trying to think in terms of what the Orcs would do once they see the hobbits, or even visualizing the situation and using intuition. Not that bias can be completely eliminated from the use of GM judgment (if it could, you wouldn't need a GM, you could just play a board game or a MMORPG), or that it should be eliminated in all cases, but it's meaningful to try to come close to that standard. (It's a similar logic which enables us to have faith in the integrity of the judicial system, and which causes our faith to be shaken when we see certain patterns of judgment or inconsistencies.)

Quote from: David RBut surely this is an example of a certain kind of playstyle, right? A playstyle which is more collaborative in nature. Most gamers use the traditional set up in your post to achieve achieve similar more random results. I mean to me it's seems that some gamers (the more collaborative ones) want to know how the story ends or to overtly participate in it's creation and for others they want to see where it's going.At the end of the day, both produce a story, just using different methods.

Of course. The point I'm making is that the methods are so different as to suggest different motivations or priorities in the course of actual play. I'm focused more on the process of play than the product; after all if you wanted "good story" as a product, there are libraries and bookstores to satisfy your need. But one group wants to actively create a story--that's a process--while the other wants to pretend to be characters in an imaginary situation--that's a different process.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI'm glad to see things going in this direction. What Marco's just pointed to, the GM "removing player agency for meta-game reasons" is what I'd like to call "motivated GMing". And generally I wouldn't call it railroading unless there's a conflict between the GM's motive and the player's interest. It's a social problem, not a matter of mechanics or technique.

OOh--right, I'd seen your blog post on this. Yes: I liked that.

As to whether it is railroading or not, I agree: social contract stuff, yeah. I'm of the mind that having my great plan foiled "to make my eventual victory more dramatic when I finally *do* win" is something that is often a case of the GM kidding himself ... but there are clearly cases where a player might prefer his plan be nullified to keep the game going and, so, yes. Clearly that can be okay.

I still do think 'railroading' applies to dysfunction more easily than fun well run games though.

-Marco

If no one has any objection, I'm moving this thread over to the "theory" section. I think it fits there better.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditIf no one has any objection, I'm moving this thread over to the "theory" section. I think it fits there better.

RPGPundit

Works for me.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: KeranI can assuredly dig up more specific comments on outlining, knowing the end of the story before you start writing, and so on, but not tonight: I'm up too late already.

I started to do the same last night, including a quote from Jack M. Bickham's The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Aovid Them) that goes so far as to say, "The more planning you do before starting to write, the better."  And, yes, I know most authors shy away from such absolute statements.  

What I realized, looking at a handful of books I had pulled out to start skimming, is that we can go round and round quoting experts and we really aren't going to get anywhere and I really don't care enough about this to reread (or even skim) 20-30 or more books on writing fiction on my book shelf to mine them for quotes to support where my opinion came from.  So I'll simply accept and agree with your point that different styles of writing work for different people and step away from this argument which doesn't seem to be producing anything useful to the broader discussion at this point.

What I did find before I gave up that was relevant was some advice from Ben Bova that sounds an awful lot like what Forge Narrativism.  He talked about setting up two characters with an interesting conflict between them and letting the story write itself.  I think that's pretty much what people are talking about and what you are talking about.

I also highly recommend Kate Wilhelm's recent book Storyteller about he Clarion workshops.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBTW, does anyone know if MythusMage is the same guy on rpg.net who has "original gamer" or something like that in his sig?

Okay, I don't want to say who I was getting MythusMage mixed up with over there, but since I see there's a MythusMage on rpg.net who's written about "Dragon Earth", the other guy must be a different person. I just wanted to clear that up.

Quote from: John MorrowI agree with all of that.  But as I mentioned before, the style conflict occurs when the GM or players purposely try to control story quality (or not).  There are some people who are not happy with "relative frequency".  So perhaps we are simply talking past each other here.

Well, there's the risk/benefit thing -E.'s already described: real risk is more suspenseful than risk that I know is only apparent, even if a sufficiently artful portrayal can make it possible to suspend disbelief in the latter.

I like the old Outer Limits and the old Star Trek, but I'd describe the former as more suspenseful than the latter.  There's a level on which I know that the main Star Trek characters are going to survive, even if the script presents the illusion that they might not in a fashion successful enough to be entertaining.  But Outer Limits protagonists sometimes really do come to bad ends.

In the medium of RPGs, we have a very limited ability to revise, and except in the case of message-based games, we usually have to produce responses and descriptions quickly -- at the pace of talking or the pace of typing.  The result is invariably much less polished than the final draft of a written story: most mistakes that I make in presentation that detract from the players' ability to believe in or care about the story are made irrevocably, because the session is the work and its improvising creators are also its audience.  I can, with my players, go back and correct factual errors that I've made, so that we operate with the correct information in the future; but I can't rewrite the pacing of a session that I've run badly, or achieve the levels of verbal precision, conciseness, and intensity that I expect to be able to produce in writing.

There's another thing I can't do as a GM: control what the audience looks at, what they pay attention to, by controlling what the viewpoint characters look at.  That is a most important writer's technique for conveying the illusion of peril in a series where we know the main characters aren't going to die, and also for making it easier to suspend disbelief in an inconsistent setting: it may not much impair the story if the reader is following the characters' line of sight, and the characters never notice the inconsistency.

So, owing to a difference in media, what I call sleight-of-pen doesn't work nearly as well in RPGs.  Illusionary suspense and direction away from inconsistency are not likely to be nearly as well-executed.

On the other hand, character identification can be better.  A writer has to interest the reader in a character whose nature, situation, and actions are completely the writer's choice.   The players choose the characters they want to play and direct their actions; potentially they have a greater connection to the character, more interest in their success and their affairs.  For some players, this means a greater interest in the character, at a lower level of tension: what might not engage their sympathy and attention in a story they experience as a passive audience may be entirely sufficient when they're active participants.  I'm one of these people: the very best story I have ever read or watched passively does not produce nearly as intense a connection with the protagonist as immersive roleplay.  It means that things that might have me saying, "Enough already! -- Advance the plot, will you?" in a book I'm reading might be interesting in play.

I appreciate that for some people no such increased intensity of character identification appears to occur; it doesn't surprise me if they want to dial up the plot or the game element, and if they tend to see fidelity to setting and character as much less important.  But since there is a difference between RPGs and passive story mediums for me, if I did the same thing, I would be behaving much like a writer who can't get it through his head that there are approaches that work better in novels than they work in movies: I'd be shortchanging myself by not adapting to the weaknesses of the medium and emphasizing its strengths.

The reason I don't use the story/game split that other people are favoring is that I cannot say anything I just said in the language of game theory, or in anything close to it.  I need the language of fiction-writing.  The semantic difference has a practical effect.

QuoteI have no problem with that, but think that's something very different from what a lot of story-oriented games are trying to do.

It is conceivable that I might use the story game rules that I have seen so far to run one of my campaigns at gunpoint.

So far I haven't seen any that don't give someone besides the character's player the ability to enforce false-to-the-character reactions, based on who wins the mechanical contest.  I would not recommend that anyone hold their breath while waiting for me to decide that this is a good idea.

Then, it seems that the required shared narrative control feature of at least some of the games impair the function of the GM most important to me: to maintain the consistency of the world.  Let a player win the mechanical contest and he can force into the setting something that's false to it.

Finally, it looks to me that all of Forge theory and at least some of the Forge game texts are built on the assumption that the social relationships among the participants in the game work in a way that, in my games, I would consider broken.  I don't think this is a necessary feature of games intended to generate tight and thematically significant plots; I think it's probably an artifact of Forge culture.

QuoteI don't disagree with that, either.  But the style conflict comes into play when the players realize that the "incredible odds" that their characters faced were never really incredible.  Should the characters really have a chance or dying or not?  There is no right answer to that and an answer that satisfies one player might ruin the game for another player, and vice versa.

This is true.

Quote from: John MorrowI started to do the same last night, including a quote from Jack M. Bickham's The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Aovid Them) that goes so far as to say, "The more planning you do before starting to write, the better."  And, yes, I know most authors shy away from such absolute statements.

In the case of the stories I wrote to sell, well -- in the first case, the idea for the story is the plan, since it was a short short; in the second case I knew the end before I started, and the difficulty wasn't so much figuring out what should happen as figuring out how to write events in a fashion that seemed to hang together.

In the case of the verse narrative, I planned in a fair amount of detail.  Only thing is, the plans turned out to be radically wrong.  Then the revised plans also turned out to be radically wrong.  Screwing up big time in metered verse is a major pain. Doing it twice ... :eek:

The thing about RPGs is that the authors are the intended audience, and creating the story is also watching it.  So I want to avoid conscious manipulation of the story in progress, because the act of guaranteeing as a creator that events will take a particular shape is simultaneously the act of destroying my own ability as a member of the audience to believe that anything was really at risk.  And that is why both heavy preplanning and conscious manipulation -- motivated GMing, as ewilen is calling it -- is contraindicated.  And that is why my setups involve conflicts whose development and resolution I cannot expect, with neutral GMing, either to predict or to control.

Quote from: RPGPunditThe fundamental question is this: If a player does something or wants to do something, or the dice (through combat or through random rolls) result in something where your vision of "the story" would end up being fucked up, do you accept what has happened, or do you alter the results or frame the situation in such a way to keep it "on track" with what your vision of "the story" is?

If you do the latter, then you have a conflict between story vs. game. And, incidentally, you are probably doing a sort of railroading.

If you do not, then you aren't really actively "creating story" at all, you are just playing the game, and any story that gets created is purely a "byproduct", and not a "goal".

RPGPundit

I'd let the "story" go, let the guy 'ruin it'--it is by having the possibility of a "bad story" that, I think "good story" is valueable to me. That said, it's not a situation that arises all that often and, just like I'm okay with TPK's in games where it's a far, far better experience if the party survives, I think that the possibility of the TPK improves the experience of the survival situation.

-Marco

But then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

Quote from: KeranWhat if the specific result I want is "What would really happen if I dropped this conflicted character into this situation"?

Is that really a desire for a story or something else?

Quote from: KeranThe stories I create that I find least satisfactory are the ones where, for one reason or another, I have failed to portray the characters or the setting in the manner that I think is true to them.

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.

As for stories being drained 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.

Some fiction can and does escape from the conventions of good stories, to one degree or another.  Japanese Dramas went through a phase in the mid-1990s where many had bittersweet or even entirely depressing endings (e.g., Asunaro Hakusho, Sugao no Mama de, and Kono yo no Hate, for example) and even some comedies (e.g., Jaja Uma Narashi) had subplots about, for example, a kid dying from cancer.  

I found those shows incredibly refreshing, not because they could be dark or depressing but because they were unpredictable and actually surprising.  They didn't follow the traditional American formulas for stories (though they certainly had some of their own).  My wife and I would cringe when an upset character ran toward a busy street because in those dark dramas, there was often no absolute script immunity for any character and they could very well run into the street and get run over.  In fact, in one of the dramas mentioned above, the main point-of-view character dies before the last episode and in another, one character winds up heavily brain damaged.  

The second Votoms series is in many ways similar.  It's true to character and true to setting, but when it was over, the person I watched it with (who did running translations for me) and I both sort of looked at each other and said, "Yeah, that's how it had to turn out but maybe it would have been better if we hadn't watched that."  And that's exactly why more stories like that aren't made.

(If you are curious, I know that you can at least find Asunaro Hakusho on torrents with subtitle files because it's so highly regarded -- it's bittersweet rather than wrist-slitting, "Jesus, Grandpa, what did you show me this thing for?" depressing.)

Quote from: KeranYou've omitted a possibility.

I can set up in a fashion that often, but not invariably, produces results I enjoy as stories, and play it out naturally from there.  You may think the result is a bad story -- and it will be, at least in the sense that it will be very first draftish, since we don't often revise in this medium.  But I may find that the very real risk that the characters will fail -- or that the problem I pose will turn out not to have any solution at all -- is worth its weight in platinum: it's real suspense, not the sleight-of-pen that an author has to perform to try to keep a reader bothering to turn the pages in a genre in which the characters aren't allowed to crack up irrevocably.

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.  

If you are willing to let the story fail to be a good story, then story is not your primary concern.  Something else is.  Despite what you've said, I think it sounds a lot like or really is GDS Simulationism.  It sounds a lot like putting plausibility and fidelity of character and setting above telling a good story.

Where I think the GDS fails (and where I think the GNS fails to a different degree) is that many players who want the game to play out naturally and plausibly are willing to tolerate dramatic story-like set-ups designed to make it very likely that the results of the game will be story-like, even without it being forced to be story-like.  One can often get story-like results from a GDS Simulationist game simply by creating characters with questions or conflict that they want to resolve.  That point really doesn't have a place in the GDS.  Where I think the GNS Narrativist games go too far and also carry the story-like manipulation into the game resolution, itself, by using mechanics that deal in story quality and story control.  

Quote from: KeranThat's why part of setup is constructing situations in which I'm not likely to have to do things like that.  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.

Quote from: KeranSure.  But you're talking to someone whose major characters have sometimes reacted in a fashion in which, OOCly, I would greatly have preferred that they had not reacted.  And I let them do it.  The reason I let them do it is that they were true reactions, and there is no action as undesirable in a story as rendering a main character a hollow shell by falsifying their reactions.

I've been known to play badly, to misplay a character by mistake; but the Prime Directive is never, ever, ever intentionally to utter a falsehood about any character or the setting.

When I create things, I try to create things that are interesting, and that will fit together in particular ways; but once they're "really" there, they're sacrosanct.  If I know how the NPC should react based on their nature, that's what's going to happen.

And to me it seems like that means that you have a higher priority than story, and I'm sorry but it also still sounds an awful lot like GDS Simulationism.

It's the same thing that drives Immersive players to have their characters do things that ruin the game for people with different priorities.  It's making fidelity and plausibility primary.  And while it can produce a good story, it can also conflict with what's necessary to create a good story (which could involve, for example, revision of the character to make them follow a more desirable path).  

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 even 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).

Quote from: KeranI have found that managing to play through to the point where at least one of the significant conflicts on the table is resolved makes for a satisfactory plot, at least in my eyes.

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.

Quote from: KeranIndeed.  And in practice, I've been playing with another rgf.advocate, and we discovered that our typical language tends to be somewhat misleading: I flatly refuse to admit that a good story is necessarily false to the characters and the setting and have always hedged enough to sound significantly dramatist, and his descriptions of his style have always sounded more simulationist.  In practice it works out the other way around: my campaigns are simmy as hell and his have a heck of a lot more conscious production of plot tension, etc.

I think you sound almost entirely Simulationist.  You want a dramatic story-rich set-up and would like a story, but your primary value during the action seems to be fidelity to setting and character.  The GDS deals with in-play priorities, not set-up, so I don't see the conflict.  

As for a good story being false to character and/or setting, that's not necessarily true.  But the reason why it often can and does become an either-or choice is that natural real world life does not automatically produce good stories, even when the situation is rich with story possibilities.  As such, telling good stories ideally means selecting a limited subset of what's true to setting and character that overlaps with creating a good story.  The ideal is the union of good story and fidelity to character and setting.  Two points about that.

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.

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.

Quote from: Keran... Do I?

Well, broadly, given what I think you probably mean: you're thinking of fitting the character into a particular campaign, right?  And there are certainly characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular campaigns -- I retired one before he even got into play once, when I realized what his probable reaction to the other characters would be, given what he knew and the way one of them was behaving.  There are characters whose natural reactions will wreck particular stories, or particular sorts of stories.

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?

Quote from: KeranWhat there probably aren't is very many characters about whom no story can satisfactorily be told.  Most people have conflicts they either resolve, or decisively fail to resolve.

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?  

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.

Quote from: KeranDisclaimer: I don't write for publication often because I hate the business end of writing, but I have sold stories to minor markets, and there are a few of characters I wrote purely for commercial purposes.  And they're not "real."  They're written the way they are purely to produce an effect.  Some of them are shadows of "real" characters who're hanging around in my head, and whom I may write or play some day.  This isn't my usual approach, though, and I don't like writing this way well enough to keep it up, even though I succeeded at it, I suppose.  Aside from these cases ...

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.

Quote from: KeranIf I'm bored with the way the character copes with conflict, I'm not going to finish the story.  So far I haven't had that happen, though -- boredom tends to be a sign of mis-structuring the story so that what was interesting about the character in the first place isn't what I end up writing about.  Aside from that, mostly I think that presenting a conflict in an interesting manner is a matter of skill.

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.

Quote from: KeranIf I think the reader is likely to be bored with the way the character addresses an interesting conflict, it means there's a fault in my presentation that I should try to fix.

Sometimes, putting lipstick on a pig is not going to change the fact that you are presenting a pig.  There are plenty of things that can make the way a character addresses an interesting conflict uninteresting.  For example, suppose your character addresses the conflict in the most predictable way possible?  "Yeah, I saw that coming on page 4."  Can you revise page 4 to make it less obvious?  If you are writing a story?  Yes.  If you are playing a role-playing game, can you revise what happened during the first session to make how your character is going to make a choice in the last setting more interesting?  Probably not.

Quote from: KeranI don't adjust the character or the built-in conflict in any way to fit the plot, because the point is to tell the story of the character I'm interested in, not to relate a particular plot.

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?

Quote from: KeranI think this series of questions just told me something that may be important to why I'm not satisfied with it.

Well, I'm happy I was able to help. :)

Quote from: KeranI care passionately, which is why I'm still working on it seven years later.  Some individual scenes are very good, even excellent, but the overall structure is not good.  Which I mean to fix if it takes me the rest of my life.   (Which it may.)

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?

Quote from: KeranMost of them, except intentional plot manipulation, don't have to change what happens away from natural development, though.

They don't have to, no.   But like I said, it's still a filter.  Even if the natural development neatly passes through the filter without any alteration, it can still look like something that passed through a good story filter, even if nothing was changed.  

For example, if I have a 1 inch mesh sieve and pour a bag of stones into the sieve and all of them pass through the mess, it's possible that it was just a random selection of natural stones that all just happen to fit through the mesh but it's going to make me wonder if the bag of stones was specially selected so that it contained only stones that would fit through the mesh.  So even if it was a random natural occurrence, it's going to look like something that's artificial.

Quote from: RPGPunditBut then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

Well, no--not necessiarily. If I'm not gettin' any story-action out of the game, I may stop the game too. Same as if I was watching a movie that wasn't doing it for me. Same as if I had a really dismal TPK and lost the urge to make new characters and hit the dungeon again ("Man, can we, um, play something else now? Like maybe Champions?").

Story--the content of play that is meaningful to me--is an important aspect of play. If the structure is absolutely non-story-like (nothing ever gets resolved, people spend a lot of time shopping for no really key reason, conflicts get bypassed or dropped) I think my attention will flag (note: a string of really cool combats could counter-act this, of course ... but let's say I'm playing a traveller game without any cool combats and the merchanting isn't doing it for me ...).

So it's kind of an equally highly held goal, I think,

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoWell, I guess I fundamentally disagree about what a "railroad" is. I do see Dogs as "limited in scope" but I do not see it as a *railroad* (that is, I understand the complaint and find it valid for what it is--Dogs is not a game where you would do much but play Dogs--but I would not use the term railroad to describe it).

It's not simply that you must play Dogs.  You are given a town with a particular problem that you have to deal with.  There is only one adventure there to be had.  Don't deal with it?  No game.

Contrast that with the street level supers game that I've played where the GM ran the city as having all sorts of interesting things going on that the players might choose to deal with and the players could pick what they wanted to pursue.

Quote from: Marco1. The player (let's say, in a dungeon or spy game) comes to the table knowing there will be a mission and they will go to solve it. If the player is complicit and understands this correctly then it isn't dysfunctional (IMO, a key point of railroading). In any event, there is agreement and I think that distinguishes it from being something "the GM is doing."

It's still something the GM is doing.  The player is simply agreeing to it.  I don' tagree that a key point of railroading is "dysfunction".  They key feature of a railroad is a track that you can't leave.  Think about what the word literally means and why it's used to describe what the GM is doing.

Many people have enjoyed Ken Rolson's adventure.  When doing some playtests for him years ago, he described his scenarios as "greased rail adventures".  That's a railroad where you don't even get to decide to stop and go.  You just react.  That the players buy into it and even enjoy it doesn't change the fact that there is a rail there.

Quote from: Marco2. If I ran a super-spy game and the player made a spy and then refused to go on the mission, I would tend to stop the game and talk with them: what went wrong? Was the mission 'bad?' Were they expecting something radically different--where was the misscommunication?

That the player willingly buys a ticket and boards the train does not mean it's not a railroad.  Yes, *gasp*, railroaded games can even be fun.  

The alternative is to give the players a selection of missions to choose from or a mission that's the equivalent of a multifaceted dungeon with multiple ways to explore it.  But any scenario where the characters are within a command structure that gives them orders limits players choices via GM control.

Quote from: Marco3. I haven't read the dungeon map thread (although I'll look) but I would say that if we consider a dungeon, where the PCs set the pace and where the solutions to the various areas are their own to invent (and reasonably adjudicated by the GM) then the term loses some meaning.

If a standard dungeon is a railroad then I'm not sure I see a difference between "railroading" and "GMing."

Have you ever GMed a game where the characters are free to explore or ignore any number of interesting things going on in the setting without any orders, commands, or ticking clocks to push them into the adventures?  In that street level supers game, we never did find out what was behind the vault break-ins because we never got around to dealing with that.  We researched what was going on in the city and chose what we wanted to deal with.  There are sorts of details in the D&D game that I'm playing in that we never got to fully explore, either, because our interests took us elsewhere.

The way to tell if you are on a railroad or not is to count the tracks and to find out if you can leave them or not.  If there is one track and you can't leave it, then get your ticket ready for the conductor.  You are on a railroad.

Quote from: MarcoBut we can use the term to mean whatever we like. I'm fine with having the GM throw situation at me. I'm not fine if the GM mandates how it'll turn out. I'm not fine if the GM ensures that situation A will *always* lead to situation B--but if the adventure (the context) has me going down a river where B is further down than A, and I don't leave the river, say, and go on foot, that seems pretty fair to me.

I'm not using the term to mean whatever we like.  I'm using the term to mean "stuck on tracks", which is what makes a railroad a railroad.  That's not a problem unless you consider railroading inherently bad.  I don't.  As you pointed out, players can willfully buy tickets for the train.  But it's still a train.

Quote from: MarcoSo we can call that river railroading (or an adventure where the PCs climb a mountain, say)--but then we need another term to describe the GM seizing control of the PCs actions or nullifying their decisions (i.e. the PCs decide, weirdly, to go down the river, back the way they came and *still* run into the next situation even though it was wasn't there when they came that way).

I call that "bad GMing". :)  

Or perhaps, "bad railroading".  

I think that assuming that railroading is inherently bad hides the point that the same GMing technique can be good if the players want it and go along with it and bad if they don't.  For example, if the players want to play space merchants, the GM can make them all employees of a corporation that tells them where to go next.  That can be a good game if the players buy into being employees of a corporation but a bad game that feels railroaded in the bad way if the players wanted to play freelance merchants deciding their own fate.

In other words, the thing that makes it bad isn't the thing that makes it a railroad (a track that you can't leave) but the fact that the players haven't purchased a ticket to be on the train.

Quote from: -E.It's a good point and I agree with it -- once someone (players can do it also) starts trying to guarantee a given result, it's going to damage the experience for me.

I think that's one of the most fundamental splits in role-playing style -- those who are interested in the process and those who are interested in the results.  You can tell them apart based on what they complain about how they complain about it.

Quote from: -E.1) Railroading has pretty bad connotations. I dislike any definition where someone could say, "I was railroaded -- it was nice."

That's because players who enjoy it don't call it railroading.  They call it "good GMing".  Have you ever seen one of those posts where the GM complains that his players won't do anything unless he leads them through the adventure?  The players who wait for the GM to tell them what to do next?  Those are the players who enjoy railroading.  They might call it something else that sounds more positive, but it's the same thing.

Quote from: -E.2) I don't think you can "look back" (or forward) and "see the tracks." You can't really know if a game is a railroad unless you're stopped from trying to do something you "ought" to be able to do.

You can see the tracks if you have no option ther than what the GM wants you do do.

In my D&D 3.5 game, I ran a series of adventures based on the A "Slaver" series of old AD&D modules (I completely reworked the dungeons and encounters but used the modules as inspiration and an idea mine).  The transition from the A3 to A4 module is a railroad.  The PCs get defeated (they can't win), stripped of everything but a loin cloth, and thrown into a dungeon.

I wanted to run that scenario but I knew that such a railroad wouldn't sit well with most of my players.  So I did two things.  

First, I create a trap that the PCs really couldn't escape and figured out how to accout for how ever single character might weasel their way out of the trap (the look on the druid player's face when they slapped the chainmail vest on him was priceless).  Yes, I justified the unavoidable capture in a setting-logical way, but it was ultimately just as much of a railroad as just saying, by fiat as they do in the module, "The bad guys defeat you."  

Second, I hoped the players would do a Divination, which they did.  The Divination told them that they'd be captured but "Don't despair".  Why?  Because I also knew that an NPC travelling with them had a way to escape that the bad guys wouldn't know about.  So the players bought into the idea of being captured and didn't flip out when they were captured.

So I created a convoluted legitimate trap and got the players to buy into going along with it to replace what was, in the original module, "You are captured by the bad guys,"  (The Hackmaster version has a hilarious little note about how to deal with players who complain about being railroaded at that point) but it's the exact same thing.  It's a railroad, whether by GM fiat or contorting a world-based reason for it to happen.  I justified it.  I got player buy-in.  But it didn't change the nature of what happened.  

Quote from: -E.Your example of characters who are forced to go into a cave rather than flying over it -- that *could* be a railroad. In an RPG game, if the GM told me, "You try flying, but you take... (roll roll)... 8 points of damage and return home, wiser for it." I'd consider that a textbook railroad.

What if the GM says, "You try flying.  You run into a main force of the Fire Nation army.  They start firing at you... (roll roll)... 8 points of damage."  "Can we fly over..." (roll roll) "6 more points of damage..."  "What about going South... (roll roll) "7 more points of damange..." and so on?  Does the GM have to say, "You return home, wiser for it," to be a railroad?

Quote from: -E.But let's look at another case -- lthere's a classic example from Lord of the Rings, that' I'm going to crib: Frodo (a PC in this case) says, "The hell with this quest crap. I know Gandalf has giant eagles. We ride one over Mt. Doom. I drop the ring in. We're back in the Shire by late afternoon."

The GM considers: "Well, there's the all-seeing eye; if you're up in the sky -- without cover -- the odds of you being seen are *much* higher than if you carry the ring above ground. And the Nazgul fly on these worm/dragon things... your odds of making a High-Altitude approach without being detected are low... say, one in fifty. If you *are* detected, Nazgul fly faster than Giant Eagles... your odds of not-being intercepted are very low, indeed."

Is *that* a railroad?

Did the GM introduce the eye, the Nazgul, and so on to make sure there was only one viable way to get to Mt. Doom?  If so, I really think it is.  If it's got one track and you can't reasonably leave it, it's a train, in my opinion, not a car or SUV.

Quote from: -E.Harder to say; I don't think so. It's more of a gray area. I think it's *reasonable* for the GM to set up a situation where a PC's approach might not work...

Absolutely.  That's not the issue.  The issue is whether the GM has set up a situation where only one approach will work or only one approach is a rational choice.  In fact, Tolkien probably added those elements for exactly that reason.  If they flew to Mt. Doom on giant eagles without opposition, it would have been a really short and boring story.  Thus Tolkien needed to force his characters down the interesting tracks he laid out for them.

Quote from: -E.For me, it would be a matter of what I expect from the world. Presumably Sauron, Gandalf and Elron are all pretty smart guys who are knowledgeable of their own capabilities and their enemies.

It's *unlikely* that they would overlook an easy, low-risk way of destroying the Ring of Power. As a player in a LoTR game, I wouldn't consider it unreasonable if the GM ruled that the Eagle approach was near-unto-suicide.

Correct.  Just because it's a railroad does not mean it's bad.  After all, I take a train to work.  I'm railroaded along the tracks but the train goes where I want it to go.

Quote from: -E.All of this is YMMV -- and a *lot* of it would depend on the "vibe" I got from the GM. If I got a "You're wrecking my beautiful story" vibe no amount of solid explanation would convince me that it wasn't a railroad... but absent that vibe calls like the one I described above strike me as completely fair and evidence of a free, not-railroaded game.

In other words, the same railroad might be bad to one person but perfectly reasonable to the other.  It's not what the GM is doing that changes but how the players perceive it that matters.

Quote from: MarcoI think that the process of railroading in traditional RPGs centers around the GM acting, intentionally, to remove player agency for meta-game reasons. that is, the PC does/is trying to do something and the GM either stops it or warps the world so as to nullify it--for reasons that do not have to do with "internal cause" (what would 'most likely' happen).

Why does it make a difference how the GM intentionally acts to remove player agency for meta-game reasons?  Why does it matter of the GM removes player agency via "internal cause" or "external cause"?  The GM can, after all, manipulate what's "most likely to happen" when they set up the scenario.

Consider, the GM sets up the LotR scenario.  The players need to drop the Ring into Mt. Doom.  The GM creates a bunch of set-piece encounters that they want the players to have to deal with and has this great GMPC named Gollum that he wants to have tag along with the PCs for a while and be there when they get to Mt. Doom for that final set piece where he falls into the fire.

The GM thinks about all the ways the players might quickly complete the quest and evade all of the set-piece encounters so one-by-one, the GM closes off options.  Eagles?  Nazgul.  Walking in?  Orc armies.  Etc.  The GM leaves a single viable way into Mordor and up to Mt. Doom and makes sure that the GM's GMPC is an integral part of sneaking in so they have to take that characteralong.  

The GM has planned and left one viable track for the PCs to complete the quest.  How is that any less of a railroad that coming up with on-the-fly details to limit the players' choices?  Either way, it's removing player agency for meta-game reasons.

Quote from: MarcoIn cases like these, I tend to think that even though 'drama' (or maybe 'story') is the meta-game concern, it is likely not railroading if the convention of the game would be reasonably seen to include any kind of cinematic license (which I think many, many games do).

Isn't the core issue of railroading the limiting of player options, not how it's justified or whether the GM thinks they are doing it for good reasons like drama?

Quote from: John MorrowI'm not using the term to mean whatever we like.  I'm using the term to mean "stuck on tracks", which is what makes a railroad a railroad.  That's not a problem unless you consider railroading inherently bad.  I don't.  As you pointed out, players can willfully buy tickets for the train.  But it's still a train.

Okay--well, that's what you're using the term to mean. I came to it from another place (the term for pushing a person to sign a document or otherwise coerce them).

This is in the dictionary:
Railroaded
# Informal.
   1. To rush or push (something) through quickly in order to prevent careful consideration and possible criticism or obstruction: railroad a special-interest bill through Congress.
   2. To convict (an accused person) without a fair trial or on trumped-up charges.

I mean, you can use it to mean a linear physical structure (a river) that the PCs explore--but as far as I can tell in the common language, the term railroaded meaning anything other than to transfer by freight (i.e. literally) has to do with force and coercion (much as I have always seen it used in RPGs).

I wouldn't say there's a one-true-meaning for gaming, necessiarily (no term in my dictionary applies to RPGs) but certainly my experience with it has been different from yours.

I have also played wide-open games, yes. They're fine--no problems there. I tend to prefer a tighter focus these days due to playing shorter games with specific situations in mind (since my time to game is more limited and I want to try more things).

-Marco

Quote from: John MorrowIsn't the core issue of railroading the limiting of player options, not how it's justified or whether the GM thinks they are doing it for good reasons like drama?

I dunno--feels like there's some kind of game here and I like you so I don't just want to spar.

It seems that just about anything a GM does will limit some options in some way. It seems that there are some conflicting decision-making models (along the GDS lines, probably but maybe others).

If I, as a GM, am sticking to what I think 'ought' to happen, I, as an observer would not consider that railroading (but, again, my definition is different from yours, alas). If the GM is just punching up the drama but not rushing the characters to a specific conclusion (i.e. forcing by hook or crook that Gollum be there to bite Frodo's finger off) then I probably wouldn't consider that railroading for most groups (although a hard-core GDS-Sim group might have problems with the GM enhancing the drama at will).

But mainly, since to me, railroading means a coercive and essentially unfair use of force by the GM (the person in the position to railroad in the sense of the definition I quoted) then if the player agrees that the GM's actions are fair and just, it isn't railroading.

Since there's room for disagreement about what the term means, I'll just say that what concerns me is "bad railroading" since I consider spy-games where the PCs are sent on missions are okay by me.

-Marco

Quote from: RPGPunditBut then, at the end of the day, where the buck stops for you is in the game, not the story.

RPGPundit

That is, I think, where Marco and I differ. He really likes his story. I like stuffing my games with possibilities for conflict - personal, societal, and combat - that the PCs can interact with in any way they want, and let the PCs create the story as they go, but I don't care about the story itself. All I care about is that the game rocks and the players have fun. Usually, this formula tends to produce some kick ass story, but as a byproduct. If it doesn't, and the game still rocks, I don't even blink.

It's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceThat is, I think, where Marco and I differ. He really likes his story. I like stuffing my games with possibilities for conflict - personal, societal, and combat - that the PCs can interact with in any way they want, and let the PCs create the story as they go, but I don't care about the story itself. All I care about is that the game rocks and the players have fun. Usually, this formula tends to produce some kick ass story, but as a byproduct. If it doesn't, and the game still rocks, I don't even blink.

It's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

-clash

Well, for what its worth, stuff like your "La Famiglia Amalfi" are what I consider to be story promoting gaming. I also think that many of the things that would make the "story suck" would make the game "suck" (although probably not all of them). Things like:

1. The players all drift around aimlessly, can't make up their minds about anything, go through the motions on several fronts but don't really engage with any of the situation.

2. Conflicts don't play to the characters in any way--like political stuff when we all made ass kicking characters or ass kicking stuff when we all made poltiical characters.

3. The conflicts just drop off and dry up, even if the PCs are interested in them and pursuing them (there's a bunch of really cool stuff going on that I'm interested in--but time after time, I can't get traction with any of it because the GM keeps starting other stuff and pulling back on anything I'm interested in).

Needless to say, these, and more would indicate a serious disconnect between the GM and players--something I rarely see. It's also true that moderate amounts of these (some plot-threads dry up, but others are resolved ... or there's an ass-kicking components *and* political ones) are fine by me.

Finally, as you noted, it usually works out that way. That's my observation as well--and I think given that, it isn't hard to see some of the benefit of constructing situation in the way you do.

-Marco

Quote from: John MorrowI think that's one of the most fundamental splits in role-playing style -- those who are interested in the process and those who are interested in the results.  You can tell them apart based on what they complain about how they complain about it...

1) I'm still not happy with any definition of "railroading" that's "good" -- that people are happy with -- to the extent that these things have meaning, railroading to me means being forced to take a certain path against one's will.

This is just a matter of terminology; not a substantial issue, but IME most people define railroading as a bad thing.

I would call a game with constraints that everyone was happy with something else (possibly a "game with constraints.")

2) If I read you correctly you're distinguishing "railroading" based on the GM's intent.

If the GM created the All Seeing Eye to force play down one path, it's a railroad. If he didn't, it's not.

I think that's reasonable, and I agree with that -- and it brings in the element of player-GM trust.

If I trust my GM not to railroad (I can't know *for sure*), then an Apocolypse Now scenario is fine. I know I'm allowed to abandon the mission. I know I'm allowed to pay mercenaries to come with me. I know I'm allowed to call in the air strike without ever meeting Kurtz.

None of those things might happen, but I know that the GM's not committed ot preventing them.

Further: If I try something and it *doesn't* work I know that my failure was an honest call on the GM's part -- not part of some covert story-based agenda.

I think trust is a key issue here.

But I'm curious:

Do you distinguish between a railroad where the GM only allows one option ("going down the tracks") and a railroad (or maybe something else) where the GM disallows options, but leaves more than one open.

Example: The GM allows Frodo and the Fellowship to do whatever they want with the Ring, but neutralizes any set of actions that would end the game "too quickly" -- for example the Giant Eagle manuver, I referenced above.

To me, neutralizing a PC's actions for the purpose of story (or any other agenda) is not so good. I'd even call it a "railroad"

I'm not sure your definition (with it's strict adherence to the train-on-tracks metaphor) covers that.

Does it? To me both behaviors (forcing one option, or ruling out anti-climatic options, but not being wedded to a single option) are the result of the same intent -- the desire to have a good story or something; both damage the game.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: MarcoWell, for what its worth, stuff like your "La Famiglia Amalfi" are what I consider to be story promoting gaming. I also think that many of the things that would make the "story suck" would make the game "suck" (although probably not all of them). Things like:

1. The players all drift around aimlessly, can't make up their minds about anything, go through the motions on several fronts but don't really engage with any of the situation.

2. Conflicts don't play to the characters in any way--like political stuff when we all made ass kicking characters or ass kicking stuff when we all made poltiical characters.

3. The conflicts just drop off and dry up, even if the PCs are interested in them and pursuing them (there's a bunch of really cool stuff going on that I'm interested in--but time after time, I can't get traction with any of it because the GM keeps starting other stuff and pulling back on anything I'm interested in).

Needless to say, these, and more would indicate a serious disconnect between the GM and players--something I rarely see. It's also true that moderate amounts of these (some plot-threads dry up, but others are resolved ... or there's an ass-kicking components *and* political ones) are fine by me.

Finally, as you noted, it usually works out that way. That's my observation as well--and I think given that, it isn't hard to see some of the benefit of constructing situation in the way you do.

-Marco

In our case, we've both enjoyed playing and running for each other - as well as each enjoying other's games - so we are working on a basis of agreement already. The differences are a matter of emphasis, not of substance. Your methods of creating story exist either on a character - not player - level or are done between/before sessions. Either way, they at worst don't interfere with the gaming, or at best enhance it. Hell, like I said, I use some of them myself as a GM. There is no problem there.
 
What sets off my story alarm bells is phrases like "It would be so much cooler if instead of what just happened..." or "I don't want my character to die fighting a mook..." and the like. Imposing artificial structure onto the game to make for a "better" narrative makes my blood run cold.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceIt's when there are deliberate story-making mechanics that I falter. I can't handle them.

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".

Quote from: Levi KornelsenI 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.

Quote from: John MorrowIs 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.)

QuoteWell, 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.

QuoteAs 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.

QuoteI 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.

Quote

QuoteI 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.

QuoteOn 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.

QuoteIf 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.

QuoteFirst, 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.

QuoteSecond, 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.

QuoteNo.  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?
...
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.

QuoteMaybe 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.

QuoteI 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.

QuoteWell, 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.

QuoteStep 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.

QuoteHave 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.