Stories, Games, and Shapes
Feb. 13th, 2006 11:41 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
drcpunk.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
labcatsThis may be a disorganized ramble. We'll see.
Okay, Ron Edwards was specifically requested to post his rant on gamers and brain damage, and he did so in what is essentially his personal sandbox, here, on the Forge.
Vincent Baker, on anyway, links to what he calls a "friendlier formulation", on Deep in the Game, here. I find it more comprehensible and more likely to get folks who don't already agree to consider the ideas in the post. This may be because of my biases.
Also, it isn't a rant on dysfunctional gaming, so it isn't going over a lot of the ground Ron is covering, and I probably won't either. As far as I understand it, the core that people seem to agree with is that White Wolf games purport to offer something that they don't, and if one tries to play these games as if they do offer this something, you'll be at best, disappointed, and at worst, you'll develop bad habits of dysfunctional play.
Do take that summary with a grain of salt, as I'm summarizing a whole lot of stuff without full context. There's a post I should probably do about why the Forge group of indie designers inspires in me similar emotions to what I feel towards Israel, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.
Nope, I'm more interested in the interface between stories and gaming. I am now thoroughly confused about what Narrativism is, since![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mnemex tells me I'm assuming one meaning while most of the folks using it are assuming something else, so I'll try to avoid the term.
I started with two things.
1. Jonathan Walton talked about storytelling gatherings, such as the National Storytelling Festival.
2.mnemex pointed out that we never actually tried to play White Wolf's games by the book, because we thought that would be absurd.
Indeed, I don't know how many folks do play the WoD games "by the book". Mind you, I don't know if the reboot changes things substantially. But, the WoD I'm most familiar with gives GMs instructions that boil down to "Railroad your players." Storytelling means that the GM tells a story that the PCs are characters in. This is not to say that the GM is a dictator here; no, as I see it, playing by the book means that the GM is as much a pawn as the players. The author of whatever scenario is being played, now, that's your dictator.
So, I had a love / hate relationship with old WoD games. I never read Wraith, so I know zilch about it. Mage struck me as good despite itself, Changeling as such a near miss it hurt me to see it, Werewolf as a cool idea if they'd just ditch the Werewolf part. Vampire I was probably most ambivalent about, as it got me into the World of Darkness, and Chicago by Night first edition is still a thing of beauty. It set a new bar, and, while I hope that it is regularly surpassed, they aren't getting my copy until they pry it out of my cold, undead fingers. So there.
And I liked some of the splatbooks, notably Bastet, with its utterly accurate description of what it contained, and its less utterly negative portrayal of cities and humans; and Corax, which just hit the right spot with me. I liked first edition Werewolf: The Dark Ages for its refreshing lack of angst. And I liked Midnight Circus, an adventure -- or campaign -- for all five games that actually doesn't railroad the players.
Actually playing White Wolf games? I remember running the first half of Ashes to Ashes, which actually gives PCs a choice of what to do where it matters, or at least, so I recall. I remember being surprised at the players' surprise at the major plot twist, and realizing that, just because I knew it was coming, it didn't mean they knew. And, the mechanics ran pretty smoothly.
I remember a series of games with Leslie Danneberger and her friends. They most certainly did not play by the book. They played with everything except Wraiths, and they played with ideas about Changelings before Changeling came out. They made choices about their version of the WoD, and if those didn't match what WW might do a few months later, so be it.
The games we played in had a superhero feel. The group would learn about something bad going on, and the rest of the session would involve fighting the bad guys to stop whatever it was. This was not entirely satisfying to mnemex and myself. Note that I do not mean that it was not fun. It was fun. It just wasn't as much fun as we thought we could have.
So, Josh and I came up with an outline of an adventure and gave it to Leslie to run. And, she did. I helped Josh with the outline of another adventure, and he ran it for me, Leslie, and two other people. And, he made sure to throw the plot thread I hadn't helped him come up with at me, and there were many surprises for him, as we all approached our plot threads in different ways.
So, for the two of us, it was fun, and we did what we thought would make it more fun, and folks seemed to enjoy that. I'll go out on a limb and say that it did the two of us no harm. The other players? I'm not a shrink, and we saw these people only a couple of times a year, so I shan't presume to guess. On the whole, it felt like a group of people who liked to hang out with each other, have parties, and do gaming as well. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that we tended to time our visits for when there were parties. Funny, that.
And, there was a story in the background, one involving King Arthur. I was doing my dissertation on modern Arthuriana, so, you see, visiting these folks and playing was actually Serious Research. Yep. And fun.
And we all played kickass powerful folks, whether mages, werewolves, or vampires. See, we'd all figured out long ago what White Wolf continually seemed to miss, and what 7th Sea missed, and what countless other games missed and miss: Players don't want to be the pawns and flunkies of the Powers that Be. We want to be those powers.
I think this is one reason I was delighted by Judd's Dictionary of Mu game at Dreamation in January. We got to play such roles as the Khan of all Khans, the Damself Messiah, and the Spider Jarl. I mean, just from those names, you can tell we were playing movers and shakers. Armies and nations rose and fell because of our choices.
Where was I? Right, stories. I read a lot. I read a lot of fantasy, the good stuff, or so I choose to believe. I volunteer every year to judge the books on the Mythopoeic Society's list of Adult Fantasy, and mnemex judges both these and the books on the Childrens' List. For one third of every year, we are reading and arguing passionately about books, judging them as stories, as mythopoeic works, as works that have deep meanings. Many books, I find, stand or fall on their endings, and I've coined myself an acronym. It's LTPP, or Last Ten Pages Problem, which means that, for me, a particular book fell apart in the last ten pages.
I've been to a couple of story swaps, and I've been to Enchanted Ground at the SCA's Pennsic War. I've listened to and told stories in circles at sf cons.
At Origins, a couple of years back, I played my very first game of Pendragon, with Peter Corless gming. We took a break at one point -- the game ran for about 7 hours -- and I approached a woman who was giving clues for some larp or other in return for stories. I wasn't in that larp, and I didn't care about the clues, but there was a story in me. It wasn't mine; it was one I'd read and loved, a story written in the last ten years or so that, once you remove the modern point of view stuff, made a perfectly period tale for the Arthurian canon, i.e., could have actually been told back then.
I'd told it a couple of times some years back.osewalrus had told it back to me his way. Nothing like that to see how a story breathes, what its core is -- what its core might be. What you think it is when you tell it, and what it seems to be when someone else tells it. What you can prune. And, I'd gotten some constructive criticism of my performance of it in circle. So, I applied what I'd learned, and told it again, differently, as always.
And the woman loved it, and said it was the best story she'd heard so far. That's not too surprising, as I was telling it for the love of stories.
I've told Gene Wolfe's jokes from Castle of the Otter. I've told my favorite, about the contest to win a harpoon, at countless circles, fannish and SCA, and I told it in character at a larp. At a larp we ran last DexCon, I told a story that I lifted from Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium duology, the riddle of a chariot race.
So, I think I have apprentice chops in storytelling. Maybe even journeyman chops. I've done this before.
Call of Cthulhu is a game that seems to come in for a lot of criticism on the Forge. The charge is that it actually does a lousy job of modeling H. P. Lovecraft's stories. That's pretty much true.
But, I don't love CoC for the way it models Lovecraft. I love it for the astonishingly high number of good scenarios. These are mostly mysteries, a fairly hard genre to write.
I love the way the clues work. I love the complexities of the best scenarios, and the possibilities I can see of the countless ways they can go. I love what Pagan Publishing did for a few years, especially John Tynes, who got my number. He was on exactly the right wavelength, writing scenarios that creeped me out, but not so much that I stopped reading them.
When I ran Cthulhupunk, I used a lot of these scenarios, and I learned how to butcher them properly to fit what my group needed. I asked in Alarums and Excursions if folks wanted to know how I used commercial scenarios and got a fairly enthusiastic yes from a few folks. While I was thinking, "Hey, haven't you guys been, y'know, reading my write ups? I do this all the time," I also realized that I don't necessarily go into a huge amount of detail of what I've done to and with my sources. So, I've written to date three pieces about three different scenarios -- Pagan Publishing's Common Courtesy, for CoC; Chaosium's Fade to Gray, for CoC; and Atlas Games' Garden Full of Weeds, for Unknown Armies.
A lot of stuff Ron talks about in Sorcerer seems to come naturally to me, though not necessarily with the same slant. I remember being surprised that a Relationship Map was -- nothing more than what I did all the time. I think in R-maps. I'm still trying to get the mood and the mechanics down.
Part of the mood involves the Demons. The advice I was given, over and over, was to play them like they're my favoritest NPCs ever.
This made more sense when I was thinking about larp writing. I've learned a lot over the years. Michael McAfee taught me that it is better to start with something smaller than a 60 person weekend larp as one's first creative endeavor. Mike Young generously supplied a couple of his canned larps, and running them taught us a lot. (drcpunk is in charge the night before, so long as she doesn't thoroughly freak out. drcpunk is NEVER in charge once the larp begins.)
Stephen Tihor taught mnemex and myself a great deal about procedures. Use a spreadsheet wherever possible to track information. Code it all so that it prints out all at once and can be regenerated from the files -- resist the urge to handwrite it all just because the coding or the printing is being annoying. Anticipate failure modes. It's all good -- nothing the players do is a problem. Yes, you can create a larp in a month's time.
But, one thing he didn't have to teach me. When you create a larp, every single player character in that larp must matter. All must be the protagonist of their own novel -- one character's novel may be very different from another's, but both characters must matter. This doesn't mean they are both equally necessary for the larp to run. Oh no, do plan on figuring out what the screaming minimum is, and rank your characters in order of importance. That's basic.
But, when you are writing a character, while you are writing that character, love the character. Write it like Ron Edwards would play a demon.
And when it clicks, the words pour out. Schemer? Killer? Damsel in distress? Love them all, while you are writing them. Drool with desire to play them.
Then, when you cast, give them up.
I cannot overstress that last. You are giving your prized creation -- character and larp as a whole -- to a group of players who will run roughshod over everything, in ways both delightful and dismaying.
This isn't much different than a tabletop game. In tabletop and in larps, I want to be able simultaneously to hold the shape of a potential plot -- to hold many such shapes -- and not to be attached to any of them. I need to hold the shapes to create the structure the players begin with and, in case the players are floundering, those shapes will give me what I need to nudge and then back off.
On the whole, I find overprep better than lack of prep. But, I am playing very traditional games, including Sorcerer.
Games like Primetime Adventure, Polaris, and Timestream -- and countless others, I am sure, but those are the ones I am interested in playing and playing with right now -- you really can't do much prep for these. And, that too is fine.
Nevertheless, the kind of gaming that is currently my meat and potatoes involves a large amount of structure and a large amount of freedom. The two are linked.
Oh, and they make for the kinds of games and stories I tend to like.
Okay, Ron Edwards was specifically requested to post his rant on gamers and brain damage, and he did so in what is essentially his personal sandbox, here, on the Forge.
Vincent Baker, on anyway, links to what he calls a "friendlier formulation", on Deep in the Game, here. I find it more comprehensible and more likely to get folks who don't already agree to consider the ideas in the post. This may be because of my biases.
Also, it isn't a rant on dysfunctional gaming, so it isn't going over a lot of the ground Ron is covering, and I probably won't either. As far as I understand it, the core that people seem to agree with is that White Wolf games purport to offer something that they don't, and if one tries to play these games as if they do offer this something, you'll be at best, disappointed, and at worst, you'll develop bad habits of dysfunctional play.
Do take that summary with a grain of salt, as I'm summarizing a whole lot of stuff without full context. There's a post I should probably do about why the Forge group of indie designers inspires in me similar emotions to what I feel towards Israel, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.
Nope, I'm more interested in the interface between stories and gaming. I am now thoroughly confused about what Narrativism is, since
mnemex tells me I'm assuming one meaning while most of the folks using it are assuming something else, so I'll try to avoid the term.I started with two things.
1. Jonathan Walton talked about storytelling gatherings, such as the National Storytelling Festival.
2.
mnemex pointed out that we never actually tried to play White Wolf's games by the book, because we thought that would be absurd.Indeed, I don't know how many folks do play the WoD games "by the book". Mind you, I don't know if the reboot changes things substantially. But, the WoD I'm most familiar with gives GMs instructions that boil down to "Railroad your players." Storytelling means that the GM tells a story that the PCs are characters in. This is not to say that the GM is a dictator here; no, as I see it, playing by the book means that the GM is as much a pawn as the players. The author of whatever scenario is being played, now, that's your dictator.
So, I had a love / hate relationship with old WoD games. I never read Wraith, so I know zilch about it. Mage struck me as good despite itself, Changeling as such a near miss it hurt me to see it, Werewolf as a cool idea if they'd just ditch the Werewolf part. Vampire I was probably most ambivalent about, as it got me into the World of Darkness, and Chicago by Night first edition is still a thing of beauty. It set a new bar, and, while I hope that it is regularly surpassed, they aren't getting my copy until they pry it out of my cold, undead fingers. So there.
And I liked some of the splatbooks, notably Bastet, with its utterly accurate description of what it contained, and its less utterly negative portrayal of cities and humans; and Corax, which just hit the right spot with me. I liked first edition Werewolf: The Dark Ages for its refreshing lack of angst. And I liked Midnight Circus, an adventure -- or campaign -- for all five games that actually doesn't railroad the players.
Actually playing White Wolf games? I remember running the first half of Ashes to Ashes, which actually gives PCs a choice of what to do where it matters, or at least, so I recall. I remember being surprised at the players' surprise at the major plot twist, and realizing that, just because I knew it was coming, it didn't mean they knew. And, the mechanics ran pretty smoothly.
I remember a series of games with Leslie Danneberger and her friends. They most certainly did not play by the book. They played with everything except Wraiths, and they played with ideas about Changelings before Changeling came out. They made choices about their version of the WoD, and if those didn't match what WW might do a few months later, so be it.
The games we played in had a superhero feel. The group would learn about something bad going on, and the rest of the session would involve fighting the bad guys to stop whatever it was. This was not entirely satisfying to mnemex and myself. Note that I do not mean that it was not fun. It was fun. It just wasn't as much fun as we thought we could have.
So, Josh and I came up with an outline of an adventure and gave it to Leslie to run. And, she did. I helped Josh with the outline of another adventure, and he ran it for me, Leslie, and two other people. And, he made sure to throw the plot thread I hadn't helped him come up with at me, and there were many surprises for him, as we all approached our plot threads in different ways.
So, for the two of us, it was fun, and we did what we thought would make it more fun, and folks seemed to enjoy that. I'll go out on a limb and say that it did the two of us no harm. The other players? I'm not a shrink, and we saw these people only a couple of times a year, so I shan't presume to guess. On the whole, it felt like a group of people who liked to hang out with each other, have parties, and do gaming as well. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that we tended to time our visits for when there were parties. Funny, that.
And, there was a story in the background, one involving King Arthur. I was doing my dissertation on modern Arthuriana, so, you see, visiting these folks and playing was actually Serious Research. Yep. And fun.
And we all played kickass powerful folks, whether mages, werewolves, or vampires. See, we'd all figured out long ago what White Wolf continually seemed to miss, and what 7th Sea missed, and what countless other games missed and miss: Players don't want to be the pawns and flunkies of the Powers that Be. We want to be those powers.
I think this is one reason I was delighted by Judd's Dictionary of Mu game at Dreamation in January. We got to play such roles as the Khan of all Khans, the Damself Messiah, and the Spider Jarl. I mean, just from those names, you can tell we were playing movers and shakers. Armies and nations rose and fell because of our choices.
Where was I? Right, stories. I read a lot. I read a lot of fantasy, the good stuff, or so I choose to believe. I volunteer every year to judge the books on the Mythopoeic Society's list of Adult Fantasy, and mnemex judges both these and the books on the Childrens' List. For one third of every year, we are reading and arguing passionately about books, judging them as stories, as mythopoeic works, as works that have deep meanings. Many books, I find, stand or fall on their endings, and I've coined myself an acronym. It's LTPP, or Last Ten Pages Problem, which means that, for me, a particular book fell apart in the last ten pages.
I've been to a couple of story swaps, and I've been to Enchanted Ground at the SCA's Pennsic War. I've listened to and told stories in circles at sf cons.
At Origins, a couple of years back, I played my very first game of Pendragon, with Peter Corless gming. We took a break at one point -- the game ran for about 7 hours -- and I approached a woman who was giving clues for some larp or other in return for stories. I wasn't in that larp, and I didn't care about the clues, but there was a story in me. It wasn't mine; it was one I'd read and loved, a story written in the last ten years or so that, once you remove the modern point of view stuff, made a perfectly period tale for the Arthurian canon, i.e., could have actually been told back then.
I'd told it a couple of times some years back.
osewalrus had told it back to me his way. Nothing like that to see how a story breathes, what its core is -- what its core might be. What you think it is when you tell it, and what it seems to be when someone else tells it. What you can prune. And, I'd gotten some constructive criticism of my performance of it in circle. So, I applied what I'd learned, and told it again, differently, as always.And the woman loved it, and said it was the best story she'd heard so far. That's not too surprising, as I was telling it for the love of stories.
I've told Gene Wolfe's jokes from Castle of the Otter. I've told my favorite, about the contest to win a harpoon, at countless circles, fannish and SCA, and I told it in character at a larp. At a larp we ran last DexCon, I told a story that I lifted from Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium duology, the riddle of a chariot race.
So, I think I have apprentice chops in storytelling. Maybe even journeyman chops. I've done this before.
Call of Cthulhu is a game that seems to come in for a lot of criticism on the Forge. The charge is that it actually does a lousy job of modeling H. P. Lovecraft's stories. That's pretty much true.
But, I don't love CoC for the way it models Lovecraft. I love it for the astonishingly high number of good scenarios. These are mostly mysteries, a fairly hard genre to write.
I love the way the clues work. I love the complexities of the best scenarios, and the possibilities I can see of the countless ways they can go. I love what Pagan Publishing did for a few years, especially John Tynes, who got my number. He was on exactly the right wavelength, writing scenarios that creeped me out, but not so much that I stopped reading them.
When I ran Cthulhupunk, I used a lot of these scenarios, and I learned how to butcher them properly to fit what my group needed. I asked in Alarums and Excursions if folks wanted to know how I used commercial scenarios and got a fairly enthusiastic yes from a few folks. While I was thinking, "Hey, haven't you guys been, y'know, reading my write ups? I do this all the time," I also realized that I don't necessarily go into a huge amount of detail of what I've done to and with my sources. So, I've written to date three pieces about three different scenarios -- Pagan Publishing's Common Courtesy, for CoC; Chaosium's Fade to Gray, for CoC; and Atlas Games' Garden Full of Weeds, for Unknown Armies.
A lot of stuff Ron talks about in Sorcerer seems to come naturally to me, though not necessarily with the same slant. I remember being surprised that a Relationship Map was -- nothing more than what I did all the time. I think in R-maps. I'm still trying to get the mood and the mechanics down.
Part of the mood involves the Demons. The advice I was given, over and over, was to play them like they're my favoritest NPCs ever.
This made more sense when I was thinking about larp writing. I've learned a lot over the years. Michael McAfee taught me that it is better to start with something smaller than a 60 person weekend larp as one's first creative endeavor. Mike Young generously supplied a couple of his canned larps, and running them taught us a lot. (drcpunk is in charge the night before, so long as she doesn't thoroughly freak out. drcpunk is NEVER in charge once the larp begins.)
Stephen Tihor taught mnemex and myself a great deal about procedures. Use a spreadsheet wherever possible to track information. Code it all so that it prints out all at once and can be regenerated from the files -- resist the urge to handwrite it all just because the coding or the printing is being annoying. Anticipate failure modes. It's all good -- nothing the players do is a problem. Yes, you can create a larp in a month's time.
But, one thing he didn't have to teach me. When you create a larp, every single player character in that larp must matter. All must be the protagonist of their own novel -- one character's novel may be very different from another's, but both characters must matter. This doesn't mean they are both equally necessary for the larp to run. Oh no, do plan on figuring out what the screaming minimum is, and rank your characters in order of importance. That's basic.
But, when you are writing a character, while you are writing that character, love the character. Write it like Ron Edwards would play a demon.
And when it clicks, the words pour out. Schemer? Killer? Damsel in distress? Love them all, while you are writing them. Drool with desire to play them.
Then, when you cast, give them up.
I cannot overstress that last. You are giving your prized creation -- character and larp as a whole -- to a group of players who will run roughshod over everything, in ways both delightful and dismaying.
This isn't much different than a tabletop game. In tabletop and in larps, I want to be able simultaneously to hold the shape of a potential plot -- to hold many such shapes -- and not to be attached to any of them. I need to hold the shapes to create the structure the players begin with and, in case the players are floundering, those shapes will give me what I need to nudge and then back off.
On the whole, I find overprep better than lack of prep. But, I am playing very traditional games, including Sorcerer.
Games like Primetime Adventure, Polaris, and Timestream -- and countless others, I am sure, but those are the ones I am interested in playing and playing with right now -- you really can't do much prep for these. And, that too is fine.
Nevertheless, the kind of gaming that is currently my meat and potatoes involves a large amount of structure and a large amount of freedom. The two are linked.
Oh, and they make for the kinds of games and stories I tend to like.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-17 01:34 am (UTC)If you'd like my help unconfusing, feel free to ask!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-18 03:19 am (UTC)While I would like an Idiot's Guide to Indie Terminology, it's not my top priority. There's a lot of stuff that, while it's fun and sometimes useful to think about, I get a surprising amount of mileage by not thinking consciously about it. Fr'ex, at one point, a lot of rpgs and supplements were discussing how GMs should Plan their Themes. WoD, of course, but also the delightful Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads for Cyberpunk touched on this. And, I decided that my way of not planning out themes worked quite well for me, thank you very much.
It didn't mean that I didn't have themes, of course. I'd look back on sessions, and think, "Ah, I seem to have a father-son relationship theme here. Cool." I couldn't have done it as well if I'd planned it.
None of which is to say that it isn't useful thinking about themes and terminology and all that. But, the bottom line for me is actual play. Is it working? If so, cool. The theory and all that is secondary -- I can study it at leisure, and it will percolate through my brain.
This is even true for the Sorcerer campaign I'm running. I did a lot of planning, and probably more deliberate thinking about themes and such than I've done before. And, all that was cool.
But... after this last session, I realized that there's a fascinating theme about family, what it is, what you do for and to family, how far you'll go for your family and for your position in your family. And, I planned none of this consciously.
This isn't to say that my prep work didn't lead to this theme, especially given the response-and-reevaluate pattern I use between sessions. But, I don't think I could have consciously planned it.
I'm a bit afraid of centipede's dilemma. And, I do not want to find myself so bogged down in theoretical questions that I'm not running and playing the games.
All of this is a long way of saying: Thanks. I appreciate the offer, and if I can think of a concrete question (as opposed to "Could you explain all of this?"), I will ask it.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-18 06:21 am (UTC)