Thanks for explaining it Robin. I've been reading with a keen interest your column and your games (specially HeroQuest). I may be mistaken but you are the only person I know that's working on the formalization of a method for roleplaying that takes into account the methods underlying other types of narrative production. I'm glad you are doing it. I think that this is something missing from roleplaying. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons why roleplaying didn't evolve as much as we would love to is precisely because it does not have clear directions in this field. Roleplaying is like a movie business that has the top quality special effects (rules and mechanics), but is almost illiterate in terms of putting down narrative structure.

My interest in your work lead me to try to understand better narrative methods. I knew something about creative writing but my interest has been in cinema and other "live" narrations. A book I enjoyed a lot is Drama Writting by Yves Lavandier (I have the last French edition, in fact). It's a great book because it is very comprehensive.

Still, I suspect you are not going in the right direction. The reason is simple, I see roleplaying has being a different thing from drama or story. It shares a lot with "live narrations", and also with "text narrations" (less so with the later), but it also is very different and requires other standards.
I don't have time to explore these issues, but I hope I can do it some day (my priorites are in writting my own rpg)... or maybe you will do it yourself. I'll keep watching your path, do keep moving.

Sergio

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I consider RPGs to be roughly as different from film, television, literature, comics and radio drama as those forms are from one another. If I understand your stance correctly, my take is somewhat less radical than yours.

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Yes, and no!
You see, I relate rpgs to those forms but not in the terms people often do. I mean, when people think about films, books, comics, etc., they think about the end product, the finished story. That's why they use words such as 'liner', 'three-stage structure', etc. And when they get inspiration from those forms for their roleplaying, they look at rpgs as a form to get to a finished product. In a sense, that's the case with you.

Now, I think this is wrong. Rpgs are related, to movies, books, comics, etc. but not to the end product. The paralel is with the process that leads to the end product. I know people that work in different media and read things written by people I never met, and something they keep saying is that the process is not as tidy and as linear as the end product, far from that. The writter never realy considers his book finished, is forced to put an end to it, for instance. Writing is not linear, it's a choice among alternatives.

And that's how I see roleplaying, a movement within a set of alternatives, a path within a space, not along a line. (I think you are moving in this direction, aren't you?)
If we consider a space instead of a line, we start to put points in the space (NPCs, objects, places, anything that may present a challenge to the PCs); and it's up to the players to decide how, where and when they move.

A friend writer told me that she always starts with a beggining and an end in her mind. The middle unfolds and changes. I see a scenario a lot in these terms. As a GM I should have a clear beggining and a clear end. I should have things in between, things that may or may not connect the dots. Connecting the dots is not for me, though, that's for the players. (In fact the GM may have several alternative begginings and endings, since the players may not stick to one in particular... but that's complex.)

At the end of the gaming session the group may look back and put things in linear terms. Tell the story they lived in terms similar to the story they see in a movie. Their end-product may be as linear as the one of the other forms we speak about. But gaming is the process, it's not the end product, and it should be analysed in these terms.

Sergio

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That puts me in mind of James Maliszewski's description of old-school D&D as a picaresque (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html):

“I'm of the opinion that "story" is, to use a wretched bit of jargon, a meta-game artifact. That is, it's what you get when players, looking back on the events of their characters' adventures, ascribe a meaning and relevance to it all that's simply not inherent to the bare facts of the adventures themselves.”

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I’ve encountered this argument before, usually used to objectively justify the debater’s disengagement from story issues. In the interest of tangent control, I’m going to address it in general, setting aside the wider context of James’ post.

This argument against seeking reference to other story forms is easily countered with reference to another story form: the improv sketch.

No one argues that an improv sketch only becomes a sketch after the fact, when you recount it afterwards. The sketch is the sketch. It is a hallmark of the form that process and result occur simultaneously. This does not mean that the improvised sketch is wholly unrelated to the written sketch. Nor does it imply that improvisers have nothing to learn by studying and internalizing the tricks and techniques that make for great written sketches.

As in improv, process and result occur simultaneously in RPGs. Just as this confluence does not disqualify the improvised sketch as a narrative form, it does not disqualify RPGs. Our form is not an island unto itself; it is part of a broader tradition of storytelling.

It is a matter of simple reason that we can track this broader tradition to its lair, subdue it, and take its stuff.

Edited at 2009-11-11 04:34 pm (UTC)

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It seems to me that you’re conflating a number of issues which are actually separate, including:

1.Degree of improvisation (predetermination vs. on-the-fly creation)
2.Extent of player choice (linear vs. branching narrative)
3.Use of story techniques

Discussion of story in RPGs often goes off the rails when these topics get mushed together into one bundle. This will take some unpacking, so I’ll have to address it in a future post.

Edited at 2009-11-11 04:16 pm (UTC)

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I look forward to the way you will address it, but some comments first.

As in music, the ability to improvise is developped by many hours spent following the script. In fact, this is actually something that happens in most walks of life. I don't see this issue in terms of 'either', in terms of 'vs.', they are complementary.

I didn't delve deeply into story techniques and their use, I was keeping that issue asside, even if we are talking about a whole where everything is interconnected.

I was specifically focuzing on your second point, extent of player choice. And I was looking at it from the perspective that by player I mean all people around the table, the GM included.

Sergio

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Is it fair then to say that your concern with my approach is that it focuses on story technique rather than improvisation?

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Once more, yes and no. For a start, I don't see improvisation as an objective in roleplaying, I see it as a feature, so that was not my focus.

My focus was story technique. I'm glad you are looking at it, it's a welcome development. At least someone is really and deeply looking at the thing in our hobby! But... I see it as a step, not as the destination. A step where we should see what's similar between rpg and story creation (specially in cinema and other dramatic arts). What's similar, we should learn and incorporate. But we should also realize that there are many differences. We should map those differences and create our own techniques, our own procedures, our own language (when I'm writting this I'm keeping at the back of my head the concept of linguistic acts). Theatre did that, cinema did that. Roleplaying can do that.
Let me give an example:

Functions. In cinema you have the script writer, the director, the producter, technical team (photography, X effects, etc.), the actors. Note: these are functions, they are not persons. For instance, Charlie Chaplin filled the functions (I was tempted to write roles...) of director, script writer, actor.
Now, in rpgs we have... the players and the GM. That's not enough, we should change our language. In rpgs we can also identify a scenario writer, a director (the GM), a producer (the person that offers the place to play and takes care of the logistics), actors (the character players) and a technical team (the game designers that provide the rpg equivalent of photography and X effects which are... the system, the rules, the mechanics; plus the GM and the players that use those in their game). In rpgs we tend to confuse these functions because they are performed by the group of players as a whole, but in logical terms they are there.

So, it's easy to spot the similarities between cinema and roleplaying and map similar functions. That's the first step. But we shouldn't stop at that. We should look at the differences as well. For instance, the role of players, what they are supposed to do, is markedly different from what the actors do in a movie; scenario writting is also very different from script writting; and so on.

Furthermore, my point is that a rpg game book should have a section on technical stuff (the system), a section on playing, a section on scenario writting, and so on. What we find are books almost all about the technical stuff, full of tools for special effects, but that provide almost nothing on the other aspects of the game. What they lead us to play is something similar to some movies that have no content other than flashing X effects, shalow, shalow, shalow.

That's why I was and am so interested in HQ. In that game you kept the technical stuff to the minimum and introduced a lot of stuff on the rest. That's strikingly different from run of the mill rpgs. Another breakthrough on your part!

Sergio

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One more note: You distinguished above structure (linear vs. branching) from story technique. I see the first as a part of the second, that's why I mentionned the issue. And it's one of those issues where I see a difference between rpgs and dramatic arts in terms of story technique.

Sergio

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I think you're missing a fourth line item: scale. Game session versus adventure versus story arc versus campaign. This...

"I started by asking one player, Paul, to explain how he had heard of the temp, El-Lazoor, and why he knew he would be able to lead them into the Shadowfell to find El-Haumarzeid. Paul explained why, adding that rumors had it that El-Lazoor had lost part of his soul during his frequent journeys to the land of the dead."
(http://robin-d-laws.livejournal.com/325273.html)

...has a different applicability from this...

"Given that we’re learning a new crunch-based system I was concerned that the characterization could get lost. So I asked each of the players to submit a two-pronged character arc."
(http://robin-d-laws.livejournal.com/281555.html)

Derek

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I'm not seeing how Sergio is conflating the scale issue with the others.

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As Robin says, this is a different issue, even if related to structure - my concern. You have similar concerns in fiction writting (moving from short stories to novels to series, for instance) and script writting. The normal stance is that one should get experience with the shorter formats before moving to the larger ones. Another common idea is that the structural basics apply to all sizes. That's why I don't think this is an immediate concern.

Sergio

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Scale player choice and improvisation to the campaign level and it seems like you end up with a "sandbox" campaign. *Can* you discuss story in that context, beyond "story is what you remember happening"? How large can the two of them be without overwhelming any story? Is there anything else that doesn't scale up? Or down? Maybe those edge cases are by definition uninteresting for story analysis, but even so it's helpful to know where the boundaries are. Hence, scale as a line item.

Derek

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I'd agree with that.

I've always argued that RPG's are a kind of guided improv, but that may just be my GMing style. I tend to run very unstructured adventures with goals, but no pre-defined solutions.

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I think of RPGs in terms of Improv, as ph_Unbalanced does.

I'm 99.99% sure that Robin is familiar with Improv, as he lives in the second home of the Second City and enjoys Toronto's cultural life. I'm sure he knows more than me, as I don't know any of the terminology.

In those terms, I see most RPG improvisation (as promoted in Laws' books) as resembling improvisation in a good mockumentary (Spinal Tap, The Office BBC and NBC, etc). The writers come up with a broad framework of where they expect the story to start and where they expect it to finish. The actors (who often are also screenwriters for the production) work within that framework to add drama, jokes, and enhance their characters. Unlike the production crew, the GM has to accept new edits and act and direct on the fly.

Laws' analysis fits into this as a tool for GMs (and canny players) to use on the fly while creating the drama. And while planning it, of course. The 'line' Sergio rejects is the one left behind as Sergio's choices are made. The GM can use Laws' tools to help make the next choice (point in the line). It's a tool for better Improv.

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Hm. That's very interesting, Robin. Has Ron Edward's Big Model influenced you at all in the way you think about RPGs and stories? He draws a lot from Lajos Egri. Have you read, "The Art of Dramatic Writing?"

-John A. Reeve

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I read enough Egri to decide he was good but dated, which may be an unfair characterization. His idea that you need to adopt a central premise that takes sides and editorializes reflects his book's 1940s vintage and led to a lot of didactic speechifying.

Ron Edwards' model has influenced me as an example of what not to do.

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