Some trouble with dramatic coordination

Most of the games I have played involve 1) a division of authority between a "standard GM" and "players"; 2) character advocacy on the parts of the players; and 3) naturalistic modeling on the part of the GM. When I step outside that bubble, I have a lot of trouble! (One exception, Monsterhearts, simply because I know the genre so well I might as well be doing naturalistic modelling.)

I'm thinking here about four different games, all of which went poorly, for different but related reasons. My S/Lay w/Me game with Lori; my Shock: game with Jay and Eric; my game of PLAY with Misha, Ken, and Divya; and every game of Tales of the Round Table I have played.

S/Lay w/Me

 

I thought I was going to crush this game because I had had such a good time playing it with Claudio. Though now I would add a caveat to that game. I'm not sure I had a real "story now" moment when playing, because I never had to make any difficult choices. I always knew what Agathon wanted and how he would go about getting it. I did say that at the time, but I don't know how much importance I placed on it.

Anyway, I played with Lori, and it went poorly. We both kept trying naturalistic modelling, just following each scene up with the thing that was most likely to happen next, rather than the thing that was interesting or thematic. And we played extremely tight. I introduced all the fictional elements, aside from Lori's character, and they responded to each move with their character's actions. The game lacked drama, pacing, and interest, despite some good s&s ideas.

I'd try to play again, but I don't know how or why I would have a different result, unless I played with somebody who was really good at dramatic coordination, and could pick up my slack.

Shock: Social Science Fiction

 

My play group ran into two problems with Shock:. First, we played the game as a character advocacy game with naturalistic modeling, and second, we kept resolution really abstract.

When we started play, we all chose topics that interested us personally and the group collectively. Energy was high. Our shared passion for the fiction was obvious.

We had a rules-fuckup early on; for some reason Eric didn't make an antagonist, and Jay made his antagonist for the wrong character. Or something like that, this was months ago so I don't remember every detail.

We quickly busted through the limits of our scenario prep -- in Jay's protagonist's very first scene, he lost a conflict and went to jail for 5 years. After that, his initial story goal and antagonist weren't really relevant. We kept playing him, adapting the rules as best as we could, because his situation was really interesting. I'm glad we did! His story turned out to be the most interesting.

Recounting some good stuff from Shock:

 My protagonist was a little kid whose story goal was to repair his relationships with his family and friends in the midst of the lunar rebellion. I chose that story goal because I felt like it was what he would have wanted, not because it was a story event I personally was interested in seeing. (I was interested, but that wasn't the reason.) His material turned out boring. (Maybe because he didn't have an antagonist!) In my very first scene with him, I triggered a conflict to make friends with a bully, and won. After that, it didn't feel like he had any story left in him. My antag player couldn't think of a frame for his next scene, and we simply dropped him out of the story.

In every scene, the conflict was triggered by a disagreement between characters. None of the players had strong enough opposing feelings about what should happen that we started a conflict about our own ideas. That said, we were really invested in the conflicts -- I was actively looking forward to each one -- but I never thought, "Oh, I want this to happen, let's try to make it happen." I always thought "I wonder how this conflict will turn out!".

Resolution was weighty and important, and we couldn't wait to roll the dice, but it was curiously and unpleasantly abstract. Most of the time, we skipped right from the statement of intent and the die roll to effects, leaving the actual action vague. This is a skill issue on our part -- we could have simply paid more attention to events, stayed with them for longer, actually described what we were doing. But we might also want rules that require a tight back-and-forth between the dice and the fiction.

PLAY

This game is wacky in all sorts of ways. It's a found footage horror game where you take turns describing scenes, shots, whatever, from old VHS tapes. You switch around "camera" players, who frame scenes and introduce characters, and "actor" players, who play on-screen characters.

You're supposed to say everything within the idiom of a video (or audio) recording. You can't say "It's cold", you have to say "Their breath frosts in the air" or "There's ice on the windows, and everybody is shivering". You don't have a disembodied camera, like in a normal movie; the person controlling the camera is actually a character in the game. So ideally you don't have (say) overhead shots of a scene, unless somebody for some reason actually took that shot.

I did not personally have trouble with this; I watch a lot of movies, including found-footage horror movies. Misha and Divya had trouble conceptualizing the events of the game as things possibly portrayed on a screen, and as camera both kept saying things outside their remit. Ken got as far as playing the game as a movie, but not as a found-footage movie. When I tried to introduce the cameraman as an actual playable character, nobody knew what I meant, everybody was frustrated, and we decided to play something else.

Even if we had grasped the idiom, we would not have made particularly good fiction, because we weren't playing with any kind of coherence, drama, or pacing. Play was just a series of weird little scenes. Now I think PLAY is fine with that -- it even has a chance of randomly ending the game at any point, frustrating anybody's attempt at building a coherent narrative -- but I don't think we ever would have got past that point. And I think PLAY certainly allows some play group to get past that point, to make actually engaging fiction.

Tales of the Round Table

 

In this game, players take on the role of Arthurian characters, and take turns trying to convince a set of characters to solve a pre-written set of problems. Each player makes up an obstacle to the solution of the problem. Unfortunately, it's really easy to make a difficult or impossible obstacle, and not easy to make a thematically interesting response to such an obstacle.

In my last game, on the second scene, Oona accused Arthur of ethnic cleansing. There's nothing to say if this is true or false except our own reactions to the statement, and we turned out to support it. Fuck, I guess the game is about ethnic cleansing now.

I think the game relies on players not going as hard as they can, when they dream up obstacles; in effect it asks us to pull our punches. Next time I play, I will give a little piece of advice: don't make up an obstacle so that you can beat the other player, make up an obstacle that you think is interesting.

This is difficult to do. All my instincts tell me to either aim for victory, and make up the cruelest thing I think the fiction can support, or play totally naturalistic, and just ask what the fiction would be like.

The curse of dramatic coordination

When I'm writing a story, there's no contingency, and I'm free to move about as I please in time and space. I can put a scene down and pick it up again later, whenever I please. I can make up a theme and try to embody it in a story. I can't do any of that shit in an RPG.

In most RPGs, we proceed through events chronologically. We discovery themes in play, not in advance. We have to deal with other people and their ideas. This is really difficult!

I want to emphasize, for the sake of my own bruised ego, that I am a competent storyteller and writer. But I am not a competent narrativist gamer, not yet anyway. I just can't consistently bring the drama as a GM.