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So they're too focused on just fulfilling the impulses of the moment to do anything as premeditated as hating someone...

I think I can grasp that.

They're no more capable of hate than Beavis and Butthead are.

I kinda like this thread. But, at the same time, it kinda bugs me too, because I feel like there's some navel-gazing going on, and a lot of excited pop psychology analysis, without anyone really sitting down and taking a look at the bigger picture.

This is a thread about literture. Yup.

An Agatha Christie mystery has a certain amount of entertainment value. Poirot (say) is a wittily writen character, and the plotting and structure encourages the reader to engage in an interesting logical exercise. But they're pretty short on drama. You compare an Agatha Christie novel to Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep," and you see a huge difference.

Good drama requires losers. If you don't have losers, your dramatic conflict lacks all kinds of punch. I've started keeping a kind of running tally when I read. The better the writer, the more screwed up their characters tend to be.

I'm not, like, saying that EVERY character has to be a total whack-job. But, the whack-jobs are where the dramatic impulse comes from. They drive the conflict. Without them, everybody would be Ned Stark, the Lawful Good Northman.

So, take a look at William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, and so on, and check out how messed up some of their characters are, and how that "messed-up-ness" relates to the drama at large.

Now, let's talk history. Unless you're one of those D&D Drifter types like Raven, dramatic conflict is not really the point of a D&D game. Dramatic conflict and the other trappings of literary form are used to color the framework for Step On Up. The Evil Necromancer or the Lich Lord or the Drow Queen or whatever are Total Whack Jobs to explain why the PCs are justified in beating the crap out of them. They kidnap princesses, pilage the countryside, rape vilagers, murder innocents, etc., all in a days work, for one purpose: To establish in the minds of the players "Aha! Cool, a bad guy. Let's go get him!"

It works the same way in reverse if the PCs are evil. "We are Total Whack Jobs, so let's go kill some vilages and get XP! Ah, we are Total Whack Jobs, so the guards want to kill us."

When you do start getting into dramatic, story-centric role-playing (Say, what Vampire wants to be) there's always the assumption carried over from D&D and earlier games that it will be PCs vs. the Whack Jobs, with the Whack Jobs controled by the GM. That's just what gaming is, right? The GM runs the Bad Guys.

Only, it's not. There are a lot of games that have come out of the Forge that chip away at the traditional role of the GM, distributing GM tasks more and more. Before the Forge, even, there were still lots of people who would distribute GM tasks with traditional rules-sets, just because they wanted to.

Also at the Forge you've got a whole bunch of people who have been thinking more or less non-stop for like 4 years about *what drama is.* They understand about the Whack Jobs. If the Whack Jobs are an essential component to dramatic conflict, and if Narrativism is all about player authorship, then shouldn't the PCs be Whack Jobs? At least some of the time?

That's what Narrativism is about, remember. These moral quandries that the real people (the players) find interesting. There aren't very many of these in Agatha Christie. There's a crapload of them in the Big Sleep.

Quote from: Paganini
When you do start getting into dramatic, story-centric role-playing (Say, what Vampire wants to be) there's always the assumption carried over from D&D and earlier games that it will be PCs vs. the Whack Jobs, with the Whack Jobs controled by the GM. That's just what gaming is, right? The GM runs the Bad Guys.

Y'know, I'm glad you cleared that up for me--'cause I was doing it wrong.

Edited to add: I realize this is a canonical version (here) of V:tM. However, WoD is a lot of different things and the books I read (mostly 1st Ed Vampire and GURPS V:tM) certainly didn't spell out what you're saying they did with anywhere near the clarity you are imparting to them.

I happen to agree with your statement on literature but I don't think your extension of this to the games you are talking about is in any way rigorous.

-Marco

Marco, that's like... totally random sarcasm. I'm sitting here all "what the heck?"

Obviously I'm generalizing. People do things lots of different ways. Fred's asking about a trend. I happen to actually know some people who play V:tM, and it's the only WW book that I've actually read. So, it was an example that sprang readily to mind.

So, like, take a deep breath and read a little slower. You say you agree with my point. You say what I described is canonical V:tM. So.... uh... what's the problem?

Quote from: PaganiniMarco, that's like... totally random sarcasm. I'm sitting here all "what the heck?"

Obviously I'm generalizing. People do things lots of different ways. Fred's asking about a trend. I happen to actually know some people who play V:tM, and it's the only WW book that I've actually read. So, it was an example that sprang readily to mind.

So, like, take a deep breath and read a little slower. You say you agree with my point. You say what I described is canonical V:tM. So.... uh... what's the problem?

It's canonical in terms of a "strongly held belief" that a lot of people here share. I don't think it's a rigorously proveable one. I found the 1st Ed and GURPS Vampire books very, very much capable of making characters who were, as you put it, whack jobs.

We had games that centered on those themes and were very successfully run. We made a strong attempt to play by the rules so I think we were pretty accurate on that score.

I think it's a canonical belief. I think it is, simply, opinion. I wouldn't object if you said "When I ran Vampire I made these assumptions" but saying the game itself does that is, IME, not rigorous.

-Marco

I am not a fan of analogies of roleplaying games to literature or even fiction.  They are two related but quite different art forms.

I'd say that roleplaying (at its MOST narrative) is to fiction what improv theater is to playwriting.

There is a certain amount of skills overlap, but in the end, the time element causes a great deal of deviation.

When you're writing fiction, you have a great deal of power (from extensive to total, depending on your writing style) to go back and fix stuff in the beginning, or go forward and make solid decisions about where the flow will go.  In a roleplaying game, (depending on your social contract) that power is limited or nonexistent.

So forgive me if I don't buy literature analogies, they're fundamentally flawed.

Quote from: PaganiniI'm not, like, saying that EVERY character has to be a total whack-job. But, the whack-jobs are where the dramatic impulse comes from. They drive the conflict. Without them, everybody would be Ned Stark, the Lawful Good Northman.

I disagree, in the strongest possible terms.

Your personal PREFERENCE may be for whack-jobs, but I don't think there has to be a whack-job for there to be a strong dramatic impulse.

I have found HIGHLY dramatic situations where a SINGLE flaw was played on and made the focus of play, and much drama resulted.

Julia, for example, was a character in an Amber game I ran (not the Julia from the later novels; we were playing this based on the first series only).  She was an acknowledged daughter of Julian, and as a result had something of a frosty childhood.  The rift between father and daughter formed a focus for that character, as he mercilessly drove her onwards.  Each play session seemed to have at least one argument between the two of them, which Julian often won.  She hated him with a passion.  In the journals, her player often wrote, in her voice, how much she wanted to kill him, and that the only reason that she allowed him to drive her so hard was so that she could become stronger than him, learn his secrets, and eventually commit the most heinous of sins, patricide.  "You become that which you hate," indeed.

Aside from this relationship, Julia was actually quite the 'good stuff' character; a solid defender of the weak, enemy of the oppressor, and vocal proponent of noble action in the face of treachery, no matter the cost.  She was a bit abrasive and sarcastic in personal communications, but that was generally shrugged off as the result of never having learned better as a child.

Then came the day that Julia visited Tir-na Nog'th.  As a piece of contrast, I introduced Julia to a "mirror universe" Julian, one in which she had always been seen as a beloved daughter and a member of a family, rather than a tool to be honed and eventually exploited.  The scene was quite tender.  In only a few minutes, the player's eyes were misting, and when I turned the focus to another character, I noted that the player needed to use the restroom.  The drama of the moment was undeniable.

Edit, to add: While we were unable to follow that game to its conclusion, the player in question intended for the character to attempt a reconciliation with the "real" Julian.  It would have made for quite the twist in the plot, beause by that time Julia had begun to start recruiting allies for her assault on Julian.

I found out later that the player in question had been born after the player's father's death, and had never known him; indeed, there had been no strong male figure in this player's childhood.

So I don't think that the dramatic impulse comes from whack-job characters.  I think it comes from the resonance between character and player, and a character need not be depraved in order to have the flawedness necessary to drive strong drama.

Nathan,

Havin' thought about it over lunch, I apologize. I don't agree with the common analysis of V:tM--but I shouldn't have jumped on you like that. I think there's a tendency to be very much overly prescriptive in what games do but, presently, that's an accepted part of the dialog.

So I apologize. I'm sorry I was sarcastic with you.

-Marco

/me catching up to many posts here

Marco,

Okay, I see where you're coming from now. I don't have the GURPS Vampire book, so, there you go. I have the SS V:tM second edition, I think. In there, IIRC, it's pretty clear that the PCs are "good guys" who are holding off the "evil beast within," while the "bad-guys" are the ones who have given in to the hunger, are interested in humans only as food, perpetuate atrocities, etc. etc. I guess I should have been more specific with my references. So, we're cool. :)

Fred,

It's not an analogy; there's no "is to as is to." Ron's original articulation of Narrativism was given in terms of short-story writing. I'm not saying "here's something similar to help you understand." I'm talking procedure. "This is what we do."

Your second doesn't really contradict my point. Julia is a great example of a messed-up character. She has problems. She's not *predictable.*

. . . Hmm. Something just ocured to me.

Like, well-adujsted characters are predictable, right? You always know that Ned the Lawful Good Northman will do the honorable thing. It's how he's wired. His function in the story is to be the Good Guy. The same thing applies to well-adjusted Bad Guy characters. Drama, like I pointed out previously, comes from characters being Messed Up. Messed Up people are *not* predictable. You don't know what their problems will drive them to do.

But the Losers we're talking about here actually are very predictable. The always kill puppies for satan, or whatever, because that's how *they're* wired. So there's not much dramatic conflict there. I think I see why you were making a contrast between MLWM and KPFS.

In MLWM, the guys can eventually break free, they can have resolution. In KPFS, they don't have that opportunity. They stay losers, and just keep on killin' puppies.

Hmm.

Hmm. I guess I really never have played a total loser. I've played some really messed-up characters, but none of them were Napoleon Dynamite.

/me thinks about this some more

Just so we're clear: in the editions I had and read the PC's were supposed to be battling the hunger as well--no argument there--but there was plenty of small minded messed up and depressive area for them to be "whack jobs."

I wouldn't say that the vampires were as loserly as kpfs characters--but I would say that there was ample disempowerment, dispair, and lack of heroism involved in play that the parts that *did* become heroic stood out.

'm just sayin'--since I wouldn't make the argument that a scheming Toreodor was as down and out as the loser-squad this thread is about--but I also wouldn't class the characters I saw as D&D heroes either. There was certainly tons less combat and nothing that resembled a dungeon crawl: and the players saw themselves as (somtimes) being badguys--but in a bad, even pathetic way (Guy A frenzied and killed a gas station attendant. Guy B, horrified, began the work to burn it down to cover their tracks--he certainly wasn't reveling in his power or evilness--he was projecting, and I think feeling, helpless and impotently enraged at being cursed with vamparism).

-Marco

Quote from: Paganini
In MLWM, the guys can eventually break free, they can have resolution. In KPFS, they don't have that opportunity. They stay losers, and just keep on killin' puppies.

Yes, this is a very important part of my point.

With regard to short story writing, I understand that writing fiction is presented as exemplary of what narrativist players do.

I deny that it is, in fact, exemplary.

A good short story writer goes back and edits and tweaks and rearranges his work, well, as long as he's not someone like Hunter S. Thompson.

A narrativist roleplayer can't do that, or if he does, he doesn't have nearly as much power to do it.

This is a fundamental flaw in the example, and it is why I deny the applicability of any examples that rely on fiction rather than actual play.

Quote from: MarcoGuy A frenzied and killed a gas station attendant. Guy B, horrified, began the work to burn it down to cover their tracks--he certainly wasn't reveling in his power or evilness--he was projecting, and I think feeling, helpless and impotently enraged at being cursed with vamparism.

This isn't a refutation of my thesis, because it falls under the second category, "struggle" roleplaying.  Yes, it's not "hero" roleplaying, but Vampire rarely is.  It's also not "perverse" roleplaying because they weren't reveling in it, trying to lose their humanity as quickly as possible.

State "A" is nobility (at some level).  State "B" is depravity, a complete lack of anything noble.  The arrow points in the direction that the PC's strive (not necessarily what they actually accomplish).

A -> A  Hero Roleplaying
B -> A  Struggle Roleplaying
A -> B  Perverse Roleplaying
B -> B  Loser Roleplaying

Wasn't meant to be a refutation of the statement--just that not all protagonists need to be as extreme as kpfs. You don't dig on the losers, and that's cool. It's not my favorite thing myself but I'm not, y'know, concerned about it.

If Vincent ran a kpfs game at a con, I'd give it a go.

-Marco

Indeed, I agree.  Characters don't need to be as extreme as in KPFS.

It's part of my reason for posting that I didn't understand why anyone WOULD make a character as extreme as in KPFS.  I was trying to understand the purpose of it.

Vincent (I think) said (as I understand it) that the reason the characters in KPFS are so extreme, the reason for "loser" RP, is that it creates an environment where the players can let their inner loser out in public, and be forgiven for it by the group, and thereby obtain a different kind of gratification than "winner" RP or "struggle" RP would give.

I'm still not sure whether I agree with this.

EDIT: Or rather, if it's true, I don't fully understand how or why it's true.

Well Fred, you know there's only one way to find out.

I'll bet you'll be surprised which of your friends are willing to try it with you.

-Vincent
who is about to get shitkicked by a demon for a scab.