Story-structure led game idea (GNS wrangling)

[Tom Garnett]

Hello, I'm new here (although I've lurked on and off for ages). Brief bio: Long-time gamer, occasional GM, LARPer, and organiser thereof. Most of my play experience is non-WoD White Wolf, Nobilis, Amber, Ars Magica, and system-lite homebrew - but I've been dabbling with indie RPGs, too. (LARP is almost exclusively 'boffer' type, not MET style - both fest and club). I've been dabbling in system design for years, and some of what I've done gets regular play, and modest acclaim.

This is somewhere between a thought experiment, and an attempt at game design. It will probably get wordy, and for that I apologise. I'll put some actual concrete questions at the bottom, and not just 'Thoughts?'...

I'm thinking about a way in which your group might be able to play a game which feels like a folk tale(1). This sprung out of reading through the new Changeling core book, interspersed with Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin books(2), and realising that the former did absolutely nothing to help the ST give a narrative structure of any sort, let alone the right one, and was very unlikely to follow genre conventions without serious help.

I'm not picking on Changeling in particular, here - but the general way that style of game seems to run, unless the ST carefully writes and imposes a narrative structure(3) on the session/arc plan, is that the PCs mooch around, following various leads, and/or reacting to events, until they get everything lined up for a big confrontation, after which there's an optional epilogue, and that's your lot. You also don't see the 'tidy' way in which stories will carefully have each piece of information imparted be significant once, see each gift/boon/etc save the day once, and each betrayal come back to bite you once.

Now, in general, that's fine - you aren't trying for that, so not getting it isn't a problem. But if you are? Obviously you could do that in any system(4), but it would require serious preparation, and I'm not a fan of that, nor of the railroading that it would require, so I'm looking at another approach.

As an aside, I'll define what I think I want out of the game: I want it to feel like I'm taking part in a folk story. I want an (abbreviated) transcript of a game to read like a 'real' folk story. I want a game that my usual group will enjoy playing(5). I want a game that can be run with fairly minimal preparation.

So, I've picked up a copy of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of a Folktale, which I'm sure some of you are familiar with. He analyzed a number of traditional Russian faerie tales, and found a basic structure, which all of them(6) followed, albeit, leaving some bits out - and also with seven basic roles that people play in the story. I also ran into Grey Ranks recently, and found myself quite attracted to the amount of structure it imposed on the story (It also looks generally awesome).

So, that led to the idea of having the structure of a game (and I'm currently thinking session, but I'll have to see) follow a flow chart based on Propp's structure. So, the group would start from "Right, in this scene, the Heroes(7) are going to be tested by the Donor", or "In this scene, the Villain is going to come in pursuit of the Heroes".

In terms of player roles, I'd see the Hero being a group, not an individual, with most of the players taking some combination of Author Stance and Actor Stance, as one of the Heroes, and one player at a time taking Director Stance, as they have a way to move the scene forwards, in line with the position in the flowchart. I'm not sure if one player ought to take on the various other roles (Villain, Donor, King/Princess, etc...) for the duration of the story, or if it ought to be the person Directing any given scene (or part of scene; I can see it being passed around mid-scene).

Another system element I'd like to work in, in order to 'enforce' narrative tidyness is actually recording each 'significant' piece of information that comes up, and requiring that all (most) of them be used before the story is over. They need not be obviously significant at the time (e.g. "This species of mushroom is useful for restoring the dead to life" in the middle of something else), and there would probably need to be some mechanics for how and when they were created and used. Needing to work them in, along with the limited number of ways through the story structure flowchart(, would serve as boundaries for the players to be creative within. (I find boundaries useful, generally, so hopefully that will do the trick.)

Obviously characters have particular skills, virtues and flaws, or at least PCs do, and each of those should see play exactly once. I imagine chargen would consist of coming up with a list of those, as well as the usual 'who is this person?' aspect.

While internal development is a key theme in many folk tales, I think shifting the focus towards internal group dynamics, and resolving preexisting issues between the PCs, is a more appropriate way to introduce that element into the story. Possibly up to the level of having relationships between the PCs be represented in the mechanics.

In terms of actual 'what makes it a game?', I note that while the story is going to continue inexorably in a certain direction, especially horrible (or even terminal) things could happen (or not) to the individual PCs, without jeopardizing the story as a whole, and there's also the possibility for the whole thing to be derailed with '...and so they failed. The End.' Not sure if I want the latter to be an option, but the former certainly should be. (Again, thanks to Grey Ranks for that insight).

I'm currently picturing something with a fairly lightweight system; Propp's standard story structure(9) has between 3 and 7 points of actual conflict, and while the overall outcome of each is known, the cost certainly isn't (and, for some of them, losing is a perfectly valid option - it just leads to the story proceeding differently). That seems to fit with the number of mechanical resolutions quite a few of the more recent indie RPGs expect in a session (DitV, Grey Ranks, etc), so I expect I'll do something along those lines.

Aspects I'm currently toying with include a Prisoners' Dilemma mechanic (choose to cooperate or defect with the group, doing better for yourself if you defect, but better for the group if you cooperate), and the use of a Karma track for 'damage'. Not sure about the latter, since I want to harken back to the original style of folk tale, in which murder, cannibalism, rape(10) and lying were quite acceptable, and being good wasn't a requisite for winning.

The intended audience, by the way, is probably free rules on the web, supported by play aids in pdf, or whatever other format seems appropriate. I have no interest in attempting to make money.

Anyway, that's probably enough of an outline. Some specific questions:

• Does this sound like it's heading for something that could be a playable game? Or does the basic idea of 'follow the structure of a stereotypical folk tale' just seem flawed?
• Where does this fit into GNS theory? I can't work out if it's Narritivist, and I just can't articulate the Premise, or if it's Simulationist, but doing so in an unusual way.
• If you've tried to make your games feel more story-like, what worked for you?

More general comments are, of course, welcome.

Footnotes:

(1): Or faerie tale, or 'tale'. The words get used interchangably, and rather sloppily. I hope you know what I mean.
(2): The end of ...and the Coven of Mystics was what really did it. This moment of "Wait, [the hero] realised the guy was guilty as hell, and was going to get away with it, so she just murdered him in cold blood, and got away with it. You're allowed to do that when writing books? Cool."
(3) I'm using the term loosely. I just mean 'write something that feels like a script' - sample adventures tend to have them, unless they're of the 'here's the situation, go play' form.
(4) There's an essay along the lines of 'System Does Matter' somewhere in the Articles section. I generally agree with it.
(5) Assume for now that they're happy with at least some weird indie games. I'm not sure if that's actually true of all of them, but I'm sure I can find a subset who are.
(6) Actually, it's impressive how much of a stretch he had to make to get everything to fit, even once his structure was made really quite flexible. Nonetheless, it's the structure I was after, not an analysis of existing folk tales.
(7) Propp's term. Subject to change, since I don't necessarily expect them to be 'heroic'. I really mean 'protagonists'.
( I'm picturing something like a board game, with a pawn moving around a flowchart as the game/story progresses.
(9) The two-move varient, with a optional conflict on the first, and difficult task on the second. What he describes as the most 'pure' story.
(10) Not sure about rape. It pushes a lot of people's comfort boundaries. Still, it's a key element in the source material.

[Tom Garnett]

I should probably refine the GNS question, slightly: I really want to know 'Is the GNS model useful to me in helping me understand what I am trying to achieve, and making the system coherent?' Or 'how can I apply GNS to this idea as a game-design tool?'. I'm certainly not trying to provoke a more abstract discussion of the model.

[Eero Tuovinen]

For the GNS bit, that's pretty solidly simulationistic, or seems that way to me - you're trying to replicate a literary genre here, which is one of the most common simulationistic interests out there. This particular approach is prone to narrativist drift, though, if the game in hindsight enables some sort of premise payload to emerge. Whether it does or not depends heavily on the mechanical details, I've seen it going both ways. Something as simple as not pre-defining the adversity faced by the hero can turn into a dynamically created thematic statement, for example.

As for whether GNS would be useful... I can say that just last week I had a very fruitful GNS-based game design session with a friend who was working out some stuff for a supplement to a certain sim/gam-incoherent game he's writing for. But what made that work was in large part the fact that he'd worked on understanding and applying GNS for a while. It's certainly not a short-term tool from what I've noticed, people rarely seem to get any useful answers out of GNS just like that. So I'd have to say that whether GNS will help you or not will depend on whether you've already mastered using it, or plan to do so.

I've tinkered with Propp's morphology in the past myself, too. It's not a bad basis for a roleplaying game per se, but you need to get a solid sense of what in the morphology excites you - is it the fact that a wide range of stories can be abstracted into it, or the very idea of having a plot framework, or is it the topical matter of fairy tales, for instance. If you are uncertain in this regard, perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider a light-weight experiment: pick your favourite generic rpg rules set (Storyteller, perhaps, if you know it), a sheet with the Propp structure printed out and a group of willing guinea pigs. Then just play a rough, quick rpg session where the whole group tries to follow the morphology. This should answer several questions such as whether following the plot is interesting or a drag for you.

A couple of the games I have in the ol' drawer are pretty story-like. They manage this by including ritual color and controlling the areas of interaction in the game to make for a fairy tale -like atmosphere. I'm not using explicit morphological structural rules mostly because that stuff is already in-built in the players: even the most strident drama arc mechanics really just need to tell the players when the start, what to start and when to stop, and they'll take care of shaping the events by themselves. This was kinda the grand experiment in my game Zombie Cinema - whether I could teach players to pace storylines by having all the flubbers prematurely eaten by zombies.

[Tom Garnett]

Eero,

Thank-you for your reply.

I'm not sure what you really mean here; would you mind expanding out the jargon a little? "This particular approach is prone to narrativist drift, though, if the game in hindsight enables some sort of premise payload to emerge."

So far as I know, the appeal of Propp is that of having a plot framework (it's occurred to me already that I'm pretty much inevitably going to drift away from his structure, in the interest of making it understandable and intuitive to people - but it's at about the level of complexity I want).

And no, I wasn't planning to pre-define the Villain, or the Villainy; I was intending that one, some or all of the players define them as that part of the story was reached.

(Something that did occur to me was to have a moral or theme for the story explicitly defined in advance, but I'm not really sure that it would be useful, and it feels like something that could be actively harmful if I'm trying to stick to the more visceral type of tale. On the other hand, it seems like the sort of thing that would probably emerge anyway, and might benefit from being made explicit.)

And thanks for the suggested experiment; I might give that a shot.

Cheers,
Tom