Table & Text: Strange Bed-fellows

[Judd]

(I used to do this with the kids at the elementary school ...

Your after-school program elementary school games are worth a post all their own.  Amazing stuff.  Those kids were truly blessed.

Thanks for the feedback.

[M. J. Young]

If I understand it correctly, I've done this successfully in both directions.

The Most Dangerous Game in Multiverser: The First Book of Worlds and Prisoner of Zenda in Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds are both examples of taking good fiction and turning it into a good game. A major part of the secret to this, though, is that you have to recognize the difference between the setup and the plot. It's simple enough in these examples to bring the player to the starting point and cut him loose, letting him control what happens next; but if you expect him to recreate the adventure of the original story, you're going to be disappointed--what you have to do is accept that the starting point of the original story could be the basis for any of a number of great adventures, of which your player is going to tell one.

Verse Three, Chapter One, the first Multiverser novel, goes the other direction. Several of the adventures in those pages are drawn from actual play experiences. None of them are told exactly as they happened in play--they are, for one thing, tailored to the fictional characters (who are themselves composites of several people, or created out of whole cloth); extraneous material from the games has been stripped to make these more readable. Some material has been created to connect pieces that were not so close to each other originally, so as to make the story flow more smoothly. The play of the game might be art, but it's not the same kind of art as the book, and so has to be adapted. I don't know that this is significantly different from creating a movie from a book (or a book from a movie), but each media has its own advantages and constraints, and in translating between them you must use the tools of the new medium to achieve the impact of the old.

Of course, journals and histories and such have popped up in these discussions, and I always kept such things and often read them at game sessions. How that impacts play in some ways depends on how they're done, how well they're done, and what is done with them. When I wrote character journals or reports to superiors or letters home, these became as much a vehicle for character development as for game events. Reporting it as third-party history had a different flavor altogether, but still impacted the game.

--M. J. Young