What is a protagonist?

[Gordon C. Landis]

To acknowledge Laurel, I agree there's a limit to applying literary tools to RPGs, but so far, it doesn't look like this discussion has reached them.  To Paul's comments, it sounds like the only real danger you'd see in "one protagonist" scenes is if a trully great opportunity for another player to demonstrate/illuminate his protagonism arose, it shouldn't be "blocked" by the fact that he's not the current protagonist (and your converse, where we must assume an act is significant/meaningful is it comes from the protagonist.

I think I'm with Paul on the systems question - I'd be interested what Jeremiah (or others) come up with, but I think there's a valuable insight here regardless of system - think about "who's the protagonist here?"  It does NOT have to be every PC in the scene.  If it IS more than one, that's a good thing to notice and realize you're now juggling two things at once.  Something (a system, or even a less than absolute "only the baton-holder is protagonist" thing) that calls our attention to this issue might be worth it.

And I think I owe Ron a follow-up PM on the fitness thing - funny how some things becone circular . . .

Gordon

[Paul Czege]

Hey Fang,

The way I have always looked at it is that...each protagonist has their own separate audience, an audience of one: the player of that character. Y'see in all the talk of deprotagonization, I thought it was clear; whether you deprotagonize a character to the other players doesn't really matter, it's whether you deprotagonize the character to its player.

To be completely blunt, I think this kind of revisionism on your part does a disservice to folks who're interested in understanding Narrativism and protagonism. Never once, "in all the talk of deprotagonization" was there the implication by myself or anyone with Narrativist play experience  that "audience" meant anything other than the other players. Why would I, or anyone use the term "audience" if we meant only "the player of the character"? Take a look at my http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12529#12529">second post to this thread if you dispute that I've been anything but consistent on this point. Protagonism is about communication. It's about delivering a meaningful thematic statement to someone else...and that someone else is the other players.

Paul

[Matt Gwinn]

There's been a lot of talk here about who the protagonist of a scene is or whether or not more than one protagonist can exist in a single scene.  The problem I see is that everyone is trying to label the protagonist before the scene is played out and I don't think that's possible in an RPG.

When writing a novel or story, the writer plans out what will happen in the scene before he starts writing.  Therefore, he already knows who the protagonist is because he knows what is going to happen.  He knows which characters will be deprotagonized/protagonized before the final product is ever read by an audience.  

Roleplaying games are inherently different in that the outcome of each scene is not known ahead of time.  How can you determine who the protagonist is if you don't know the outcome?  Sure, you can label one character as the protagonist, but what happens if the end result of the scene leaves a different character protagonized more?  Does the first protagonist remain the protagonist of the scene?

It's my belief that the protagonist can not be determined until the outcome of the scene has been concluded, at which time the scene can be evaluated and the true protagonist will be obvious.

I think some people are making the false conclusion that narrativist roleplaying is somehow the same as writing literature when its not.

Just my 2 cents.

,Matt G.

[Le Joueur]

Hey Fang,

The way I have always looked at it is that...each protagonist has their own separate audience, an audience of one: the player of that character. Y'see in all the talk of deprotagonization, I thought it was clear; whether you deprotagonize a character to the other players doesn't really matter, it's whether you deprotagonize the character to its player.

To be completely blunt, I think this kind of revisionism on your part does a disservice to folks who're interested in understanding Narrativism and protagonism. Never once, "in all the talk of deprotagonization" was there the implication by myself or anyone with Narrativist play experience  that "audience" meant anything other than the other players. Why would I, or anyone use the term "audience" if we meant only "the player of the character"? Take a look at my second post to this thread if you dispute that I've been anything but consistent on this point. Protagonism is about communication. It's about delivering a meaningful thematic statement to someone else...and that someone else is the other players.

It's true, it would be a disservice to people who want to understand Narrativism, but I wasn't talking about Narrativism.

I can't be accused of 'revising Narrativism' when the topic wasn't even brought up until well after Laurel clearly said what I had been trying to in the first place.

You have, however, 'caught me out,' in that I was criminally over-generalizing "all the talk about deprotagonization," and I apologize for that.  It wasn't central to my point.  I think it is also clear that 'deprotagonization' is not the singular property of Narrativism.

May I take a moment to point out that I made no connection between audiences and Narrativism (which I don't think is implied by protagonization)?  Ron first brought up the 'audience thing' and I sought to magnify that.  There were no designs on Narrativism in any form, nor revisions.

I can see that I wrote poorly about the 'audience of one' point; what I meant was every character has at least an audience of one, it's own player.  I think you might be projecting something if you think that a player is never the audience for their own character, because I know frequently I am.  I just figured that this was at least the minimum necessary; past the player of the character, a character can have any size audience.  I feel that one is the minimum.  (Why play if you're not paying attention to your own character?  Even Ron says one can play 'my guy' style within Narrativism, so I just don't see any exclusion.)

I think you are underselling protagonization if you restrict it entirely to only the other players.  I think a lot of good is done, especially outside of Narrativism, by 'being one's own protagonist.'  Whether or not a character can be protagonized to its own player in Narrativism is not for me to say.  (I'm clearly not a Narrativist.)

The way I have always read it, protagonization is about activating a character.  If you undercut what they're doing towards the Premise, you're deprotagonizing them in Narrativism (wouldn't that be destroying the player's ability to speak to the Premise?).  If you undercut what they're doing in competition, you're deprotagonizing them in Gamism.  And et cetera.  You do me a disservice if you say I am saying anything strictly about Narrativism.

One last point, I think you overstate the case by saying "delivering a meaningful thematic statement to someone else."  Have you considered the possibility of exploring a "meaningful thematic statement?"  One can't deliver something to anyone if they don't know what it is, can they?  If it's exploring, then aren't they 'revealing' a "meaningful thematic statement" to themselves?

Fang Langford

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Matt,

My concern with allowing happenstance to determine who the protagonist is is that it's one step (or less) away from allowing happenstance to determine whether there is a protagonist at all. Experience in many different media demonstrates that counting on "emergent" Story to arise retrospectively from an interactive plot-generating process doesn't work. That means spontaneous protagonism doesn't reliably occur. If you look back and ask who the protagonist was in retrospect, far too often the answer will be "nobody."

The commitment to protagonism, I believe, must exist a priori, or else the process (any process) will be very unlikely to produce Story. That's why I think protagonization, the process within the process that generates protagonism, is such an overwhelmingly important breakthrough concept.

My concern would be addressed if you have in mind a mechanism that gurantees that one character will become the protagonist of the scene, while leaving the determination of which character up to the game play. (I'm assuming that all the characters are protagonists with respect to the overall Story; the issue is "whose scene" it is -- that is, which character is protagonized in the scene.) But I think this would need to be some active mechanism that locks in on a protagonist during the play of the scene and influences the direction of the scene accordingly, not just a matter of looking back afterwards and deciding based on the course of events alone.

Game systems in which scene authorship is contested between players during the scene (and in which players own individual protagonist characters) can be said to be already doing this. This should be a valid alternative to systems in which the protagonist is determined in advance (e.g. by determining the main scene framer/author in advance who in turn gets to decide who will be protagonized, with the usual expected decision being the scene owner's own character).

However, I'd be concerned about systems that have neither type of mechanism. Universalis, for example, has contested scene ownership without player ownership of characters (though there is temporary ownership of characters within a single scene, which may be enough). Though I haven't had a chance to play-test it yet, my concern going in is that protagonism could get lost in the shuffle.

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

I agree with Walt's post in full.

Best,
Ron

[Bankuei]

I think you've made some very interesting points, Walt:

Game systems in which scene authorship is contested between players during the scene

This being that "unknown" factor that Zak speaks of, that the focus and direction of the scene can change, and that no one knows for sure how it will turn out, the same element which seperates rpg's from fiction.

(and in which players own individual protagonist characters)

I'm not quite sure why, but I believe there is something deeply vital about that.  Perhaps it has to do with being able to identify with a protagonist, and that shared protagonists fail to work as well as personal ones(in rpgs, that is...in fiction, you can project as much as you want into many protagonists).

Chris

[Gordon C. Landis]

OK, let's not try and determine actual Protagonism - let's establish (and perhaps even rate) potential Protagonism.  In a particular scene, a character can be a protagonist based on what they have at stake - they must have something significant to gain/lose as a consequence of the scene.

In Sorcerer terms, if your Humanity is at stake, you are a potential protagonist in the scene.  If you had a larger scale/different system, you might even be able to rate your degree of potential protagonism by how many points of Humanity are at risk.  Although . . . I think it'd be safe to say that a charcter at risk of reaching 0 Humanity has a stronger protagonism potential than someone only dropping from 4 to 3, say.  Though losing Humanity and NOT being the/a protagonist is probably "deprotagonizing" . . .

Erg - enough stream-of conciousness.  In any case,  the main thoughts here are "potential" protagonism, something at risk (dare I say . . . fitness?), and an explicit mechanic that lets us know that that is the case.  That becomes a tool for managing protagonism in a scene.  I in fact have a system in mind that might just do this - so thanks to all in the thread for deepening my understanding in this area.

Gordon

[amiel]

Okay, we've taken the protagonist's DNA. (I very much appreciate the hashing out that's gone on here.)
The protagonist is a person (maybe) who is trying to explore a premise. In Narrative terms, premise is a question to which theme is the answer.
The protagonist is not "psycho" (does not make ineffectual pointless decisions).
It's probably a good idea in Narratavist terms to have a mechanic (like Humanity in Sorcerer) that helps to determine Protagonism. (Note, I'm being Narr exclusive. In my estimation, Sim games don't need a protagonist, and Gamist games' protagonism is best determined at the end). In Narrative play, protagonism is too important to not pay attention to.
Part of the larger definition is involvement by audience. Therefore, player characters ( to use the more "trad" definition) make better protagonists. Is all of this (barring parenthetical statements, regarding modes of play I'm not focusing on in this thread (see the opening post)) pretty much where it's headed?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeremiah,

My only quibble is the use of the term "exploring" Premise. I figure you probably used it with a small "e," but just in the interests of keeping the jargon straight, Premise (of any kind) is not Explored, in the sense of Exploration in my essay.

It is generated through play (including but not confined to prep for play) and it is "treated" or "dealt with" through play, producing Theme.

Best,
Ron

[amiel]

Ron Edwards Said:

My only quibble is the use of the term "exploring" Premise. I figure you probably used it with a small "e," but just in the interests of keeping the jargon straight, Premise (of any kind) is not Explored, in the sense of Exploration in my essay.

It is generated through play (including but not confined to prep for play) and it is "treated" or "dealt with" through play, producing Theme.

Okay, my bad. Question: What is the difference between treated and dealt with?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeremiah,

By "treated" or "dealt with" I am expressing (or trying to express) the same thing - given a situation with characters in it, given a Premise arising from that fictional situation, events get generated through play. Those events are composed of lots and lots of imaginative input, including decisions made by the player-characters and many contextual elements provided by both GM and players. That's what I mean by the Premise being "treated" or "dealt with" - I did not intend to distinguish between the two things as such. I could even toss in a bunch of other semi-synonyms, like "addressed" or "used as a foundation for creative input," or tons of others.

Best,
Ron