Robin D. Laws - Narrative Rhythm I: Procedurals
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
|
09:20 am
[Link] |
Narrative Rhythm I: Procedurals
Engaging stories hold our interest by varying their internal rhythms. They oscillate between up moments and down moments, between satisfied expectation and suddens surprise. Ideally you accomplish this using a number of complementary techniques at the same time. Rhythm can be achieved through tone, style, levels of performance (in theater and film), composition (film and comics), amid other means.
This post is about achieving rhythm through narrative structure—as usual, looking at other forms to see what we can borrow for roleplaying.
Here again we see a contrast between procedural and dramatic structures.
Procedurals create structural rhythm through the pass/fail cycle. Our mood goes up and down according to the heroes’ success in dealing with obstacles. When are gratified when they succeed, anxious when they fail (or seem like they might fail.)
As an example, here’s a partial map of the film version of Dr. No, starting from the beginning:
For the purpose of narrative rhythm, the killings that open the flick are treated as a failure, even though Bond is absent and therefore not personally failing to overcome an obstacle.
Lateral connections represent scene transitions unrelated to obstacles. Bond’s idle flirtation with Moneypenny establishes his character but he’s not struggling to do anything in this sequence. He doesn’t need to succeed there in order to advance the story.
With more successes than failures, the map of an entire story moves upwards over time to a climax. Its overall curve is the introduction-rising action-climax-denouement model you probably know from high school lit classes. The successes and failures are the beats introducing variation into this otherwise simple line.
The upcoming HeroQuest revision maps out Beowulf in this fashion, as part of its explanation of the pass/fail cycle. The new rules embed pass/fail into a mechanic for determining resistances based on narrative rhythm.
Tags: gaming hut, heroquest, turning points
|
|
| |
so I'm curious how Big Glooms fit into this schema - if they're downs (failures) or ups (rising tensions toward climax) - if we, the audience, know they're necessary to plot resolution?
Also, how does the overall mood of the piece play into this: Independence Day seems like it's all downs until the big finish, except the audience knows there will be a happy ending, so they enjoy the rollercoaster getting there. The Ocean's 1n films, on the other hand, seem like a long series of ups haunted by the threat of a catastrophic down.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/19987194/823083) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sunpony |
|---|
| Date: | October 28th, 2008 01:44 pm (UTC) |
|---|
| | | (Link) |
|
I think in ID4 the successes are of a certain type: bracketed characters escape their doom, Will Smith shoots down an alien, the President finds out the alien plan through an attempt at mind control, etc. Out of great piles of failures small, focused successes impel the narrative forward as moviegoers wait for the next hair's-breadth escape. Contrasted with overblown, undifferentiated scenes of mass death and destruction, these personal moments of escape punctuate the narrative with successes that get the audience rooting for certain individuals whom they know will figure into a satisfactory resolution of the plotline. A sort of narrative predestination is inserted, jarred a few times by characters like the President's wife dying, but the elements of success come together like a very simple puzzle and lock together the ending.
Ocean's 11 (and caper/con flicks in general) are great to think about in this fashion because they tend to rewrite the chart at the end, arguably flipping it over, since the most common trick to to reveal that any number of apparent failures along the way were actually successes in ways that the audience was not necessarily savvy to.
Which is mostly to say that a lot of the problems in applying the procedural model to a caper mirror the problems in trying to run a good caper game - it tends to require a lot of tricks. :)
That said, in less extreme examples, there is still the question of "the twist". In a non-caper, the change may not be a total rewrite, but still be dramatic since it can still change the value of things that have gone before. In a given cop show, for example, the twist may reveal that the past sequence of successes in gathering clues have actually been a series of failures since they've been played by the mastermind.
Emotionally, that's pretty powerful, and arguably it generates a "charge" based on how much changes. That is, the series of ups might be viewed as an investment in energy that is cashed out when their state is switched to down. Conceptually, that's great, but it's hard to diagram, and it's line would be different than the procedural one, though it might be interesting to see them side by side, with the procedural line reflecting things from moment to moment, with no past or future, but the emotional line reflecting where there running totals are actually at.
Hmmmmm... great subject, Robin. I'm curious to see where you go with it from here. The RPG format being an interactive medium, an argument could be made against narrative structures, which can be seen as herding the players to follow a script. I would disagree, with the caveat that the GM shouldn't force a particular series of events. A skillful GM can "work the flow" without being a shepherd, but that demands a rare degree of experience, imagination and finesse.
I'm curious to see where you're headed with this topic. Thanks! :) |
|
