Situations and Stories
Things seem to happen in waves in the RPG blabosphere.
Anyway, Chris Chinn has been putting up some practical advice on how to develop scenarios which I find interesting and potentially useful. Find it here.
Meanwhile both RPG.net and Harnforum (free registration required) have been getting into the same practical issues of how to create scenarios that involve the characters. (Another RPG.net thread, started by Levi Kornelsen is here.) The most interesting element of these discussions, for me, is the paradigm clash between the idea of "adventure hooks" and the idea of "flags" or "player-driven" scenarios. The most depressing element is the way that "player-driven" scenario-building is repeatedly caught up in the ideology of "story", such that if you don't have a "player-driven story", then either the GM must be leading the players around by the nose, or nothing particularly interesting happens.
I find this ironic and to illustrate why, I'll offer a completely unfair analysis of Dogs in the Vineyard as a game where the players are forced into taking cowboy defenders of the faith as their PCs, because, you know, if your friend purchases the book and gets you to play the game, that's your only choice. Player empowerment is not absolute; once you buy into playing the game with other people, you're always giving up some of your power to control the scope and expression of game elements, including your own character. At the same time, everyone else including the GM is giving up some of their power to you. It's your job to make the most of this arrangement, and exactly how you do it has a highly complex, non-isomorphic relationship to whether you're "authoring a story" or doing something entirely different.
I think for a certain class of roleplayers ("immersionists", "simulationists", or anyone whose primary goal is to "experience the fictional world" without regard to "theme" or "Premise" but certainly with regard to "interest"), it's probably useful to take up an alternative to Forge-inspired "protagonism", in a combination of "PC proactivity" and "PC magnetism". By the latter I mean construction of PCs such that, even if they don't go looking for interesting things to do, the nature of their role in life means that interesting things will happen to them. And by interesting, I mean no more or less than things which the player of the PC will enjoy dealing with, and which the other people around the table will enjoy interacting with either actively or as audience. A prime example of a proactive character is the entrepreneurial rogue or the seeker of arcane mysteries. "Magnetic" characters are often what I think of as "static responsibles"--a sheriff, for example, or a land owner. However, troubleshooters like superhero teams and superspies are also largely "magnetic" in that their presumed responsibilities tend to result in missions and crises being thrust on them.
For my purposes it's important to note where player-character interests converge and where they diverge. The player always wants interesting things, while the character perhaps not so much, unless he's proactively creating them. By definition, a problem is something that the character would just as soon avoid, or certainly something that he didn't deliberately bring on himself. It's still something the player craves, but for the sake of player-character identification, it's not something the player wants to generate himself.
(I really need a better term than "PC magnetism" since it's a bit on the whimsical and idiosyncratic side, and I prefer to use jargon that's easily grasped on the first pass. I am tempted to say "PC fitness"--but that's too close to Vincent's terminology.)
Some might see this paradigm as no more than an expression of Narrativist campaign/scenario construction. That may be, but where I think it differs from the outlook that inspires common Narrativist techniques, and indeed rejects the common GNS concept of Incoherence, is that it takes player interest, flexibly defined, as the central value instead of the literary/dramaturgical concept of Premise. For game systems, this paradigm also offers as a benchmark the ability to engage the interest of the players by providing mechanics that are actually enjoyable ways of negotiating/resolving the events of the imagined world. That is, if the combat mechanics of a given game are enjoyable in themselves, then the players' interests might well focus on situations that allow them to exercise those mechanics. Yet those players may have no special interest in combat per se--give them an enjoyable system of social conflict resolution, and they may gravitate toward political or social scenarios.
Hm, while searching for another thread I came across this one on the Forge, where it looks like some of the same issues are hashed out. Just including it here for future reference; I haven't read it closely yet.
Lee Short also covers some related ground in his work-in-progress Star Moon Cross, particularly in the campaign prep discussion of "what kinds of activities do you envision your character engaging in"?
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