Central and Secondry Protagonism in Roleplaying

[Drew Stevens]

So, I was reflecting a bit today, on previously and presently run Games I Have Known.  Specifically, on the nature of the protagonism of the characters.

Now, most games I'm aware of have as an unstated goal that the players are all of equal importance to the story being constructed.  And few players seem willing to accept the idea of being 'second fiddle' conciously.  

However, a remarkably small amount of literature manages to pull off following a group around equally- and that number shrinks to almost nothing if you discount either a 'The Gang's Split Up' syndrome and two-person central protagonism.

What's stranger is that few players seem to /actually mind/ in the game.  Maybe it's just my style and perception, but the best games I have run or played in have all featured one player as a Strong/Central Protagonist, while the rest of the players were Supporting Protagonists- also important, but mostly insofar as they facilitated or hindered the Central Protagonist.  Indeed, far from minding, games with one player having a Strong Protagonist tend to be more fun for everyone involved.  The Supporting Protagonists will inevitibly have their own little scenes and moments of glory- but no one doubts who the Star is.

It's not a simple matter of the players lacking/having initative, either.  While I've never seen a game that had a Strong Protagonist and lacked player-driven initative into the story, I have also seen groups of the same (Nobilis is especially prey to this), which never felt as great as they potentially were.  Indeed, in such games, there is an almost persistant tendency for one of the characters to emerge as a Strong Protagonist.

Question the First: Am I unique in this experience?  Does anyone else see Strong versus Secondary Protagonism in their games?

Question the Second: Has anyone tried to run a game taking Strong and Secondary Protagonism into account?  Either trying to stop it, or declaring that a particular player's character /is/ the Central Protagonist?  I know I've played in game and volunteered as a Secondary Protagonist- and had a blast as a mechanic.  But when I've tried to start games that conciously say Bob is the Main Character, they tend to never start from lack of interest.  Maybe it's the terminology working against the idea...

[Sylus Thane]

Actually Drew, you're not the only one. Except from my experiences these cases usually stem from the strong or not so strong personalities of the players themselves. Almost always I have found there will be one player who make the effort to stand either to a) get things going b) feel they deserve the spotlight or c) were the first ones to act and consequently the one attention became focused on through sheer chance or happenstance.

Unfortunately my home gaming grop generally suffers from option B. Not because of the rest of the players lack of interest, but because the option B players forceful and almost commanding/demanding personality demanding that it happen. Usually what I try to do to remedy this type of situation is to attempt to equally drop clues or adventure seeds amongst all of my players in an attempt to coerce unity to be able to gather all the pieces of the puzzle, as well as attempting to give each player their own personal limelight within the story. Now not all players will take the bait and run with the oppertunity, in which case it will often be handed over to the dominate player. Most times this can just be attributed to lack of player confidence. In a way you can think of Players as a pack of wolves, you have Alpha Players and Beta Players, they either lead or defer to the Alpha. In my opinion your best option is try to be the Alpha GM and try and create circumstances to bring out your Betas Alphaness instead of trying enforce it through mechanics. If your lucky you will end up with a pack full of Alphas eventually.

Just my $1.25 worth.

Sylus

[Drew Stevens]

Actually...

Is a pack of Alphas a good thing?

See, in my experience, it's the games /without/ a strong central character that have been weaker/less fun to play in.  The more 'equal' everyone was, the less fun was had by all.  Also note, no strong central character != no strong, taking-initative character.  Like I said, Nobilis is great for making a group of well defined, motivated characters who each have their own stories to tell.  The trouble is, none of their stories is the central/focused on.  Universally, my favorite games have had a player (myself or otherwise) that I could point at and say 'They were the star'.

Also, I did think of at least one game.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer openly acknowledges that White Hats are less powerful/important than Slayers, and gives them the whole Drama Points thing- NOT to balance the roles, but the enhance the White Hats in their role of Supporting Protagonists.

Maybe it's a Narrativist thing.  Most stories feature one central protagonist (whom the audience is supposed to identify and empathize with) with a supporting cast of characters (who provide contrast for the central protagonist).  Roleplaying games actively fight this by trying to make all the characters 'equal'- which so utterly defies the Story-logic convention that it tends to be frustrating and less fun in an undenfinable fashion.

[M. J. Young]

In most of the games I have run, and many in which I have played, there was much more of the "ensemble cast" feeling, I think.

I have often complained that one of the "problems" of the current crop of Star Trek movies with the Next Generation cast is that they're done wrong for that group. The original Star Trek was built as a starring vehicle for William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, with strong supporting roles from particularly DeForrest Kelley, James Doohan, and several others. It converted well to movies, because they focused on the stars and we accepted that. But Next Generation was one of the great Ensemble Dramas television was producing at that time (L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, and several others come to mind). These worked by having many stars, and moving the spotlight from one to another, creating multiple stories as they progressed. When they took Next Gen to the screen, they made movies in which Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner starred. This is understandable--they had to pay $12M to have Stewart appear, and they also had to give Spiner something worth doing or he wouldn't do it. They are the best actors in the troupe. But this is not the way the series worked, and the movies don't ring true to the series because of it. An ensemble cast works because the spotlight keeps moving. That's the way most of my games worked.

I remember one that was peculiar. It was the first time I was playing D&D. I had started my role playing career behind the screens as the DM, and branched out as a player in sci-fi games, but never in D&D. (It was a stated rule of the group that no one reads the referee's rules of someone else's game, and we stuck to that, so I was the only D&D ref in the group.) I was invited to play in a new game, and I accepted. The referee, for reasons I do not understand, focused most of his attention, and most of the game's attention, on my character. The others got screen time, but it was very much my character who held it all together. He was the party leader because the referee invented a reason for someone to specifically hire him for a mission, and he hired the others. It always came back to him as the central character.

The odd thing is that I spent an inordinate amount of effort trying to put a lot of this off on other player characters. I created a command structure which ultimately was supposed to mean that other player characters made decisions for their groups, and I could trust them to do the right thing. I kept looking for ways to get other players involved. Yet whenever there was anything that required real action or intelligent solutions, they always found a way to put it back on me--I faced more situations single-handed while they watched than I can count. I don't know whether because most of them had been players in a game I'd been running for a couple years they thought I must be the best player, or whether they were always stumped for solutions and figured I'd have one, or whether there was some conspiracy at work to keep the game focused on me--I kept thinking that the others should be more involved, and they kept putting it all back on me.

So I think perhaps sometimes players like having one character they can look to as the "hero"; but if you structure a game well, you can create this shifting protagonism that keeps everyone involved.

--M. J. Young

[Johannes]

I think that this has a lot to do with the production and reception of a story in RPGs. While the  story is created in a collective fashion, every player has his/her personal interpretation of it. This interpretation is usually centered on the PC owned by the player. In Greimas' terms the player places his/her PC as the subject actor and the other players as adjuvant actors.

I as a GM often see one PC as more important than the others but that's because I have sort of helicopter perspective on the story. My players in the other hand don't usually feel that one PC is more central. I'm running my scenraio but they are playing the personal stories of their characters. I guess there are number of reasons for this. One of the most important might be that the player's own PC is the only one that gives unlimited access to its inner world of motivations, beliefes, thoughts, emotions etc. The inner world of other PCs remains usually onbly hinted at.

[Drew Stevens]

Mmm... possibly.  I'll have to ask the group I'm running presently (a BESM Fantasy Heartbreaker) when the campaign ends if they felt there was a particular Star, and if so who it was.  I have my personal opinion on the matter, but...

In at least one game, it went from unfocused to Very Strongly Focused when one of the players changed characters- all the other characters became lackeys (in their own words) and we all had a blast.  Best game I've ever had the pleasure of running.

Hmm.  Maybe there's something like a sliding scale.  Or a map.   You can have player authority (how much Director stance they get, relative to the GM), and player differentation (How strong a role the player takes in the game).

So-

Weak Authority, Weak Differentiation: The party is largely interchangeable or nameless, and led on adventurers by the GM.

Weak Authority, Strong Differentiation: The game follows the destined exploits of one particular character, whom the rest support, although no one but the GM has any real control over what those exploits will be.

Strong Authority, Weak Differentiation: The players have as much to say about what's going on as the GM (or there may be no differentiation between players and GM), and the game either splinters or focuses on the relationships between characters.

Strong Authority, Strong Differentation: The game follows the exploits of a particular character, and that player becomes an almost co-GM in dictating what happens and when.

And the various shades between.

[Michael S. Miller]

Part of this can also be related to where the game falls on the scale from: "The PCs don't even know each other and each has his/her own story" to "The PCs are like a single, multi-legged being. They go everywhere together, and the 'camera' follows."

In the best game I ever played in, the GM (my wife) had a separate storyline for each character, but each of the storylines tied into the main storyline, so we all kept getting information from each other, crossing paths, and eventually bringing it all together to bring down the Big Bad. In that sense, everybody was a Star and everybody was a Supporter. Some sessions were light on material for one player and heavy for another, but it all more-or-less balanced out.

With narrativist-style scene cutting and separate Kickers for everybody, I think it can work.

As far as rules go, John Wick touched on this in some alternate character creation rules for 7th Sea, where the group as a whole is given a whole mess of points to split up between all the characters, and the points cannot be divided equally, forcing some characters to be better than others.

[Drew Stevens]

*blinkblink*

Explain this Earth thing 'narrativist style scene cutting', por favor.

My general experience with trying to run multiple, seperate-but-concurent scenes at the table has been... mm... less than fulfilling, which is part of my bias that a stronger game will tend to feature a Central Protagonist.

Most literature that manages multiple central protagonists well (Lord of the Rings comes to mind) does so by spliting the protagonists up.  Which is fine in a story, but doesn't work as well in tabletop.

[Mike Holmes]

The idea that about multiple storylines and protagonism is that, if each is indeed a protagonist then the other players will care about what's going on, even when they're not playing. All the players care about all the characters. When that happens, then it's nearly as fun to just be audience part of the time. Theoretically. I've seen it work. It's even important for the "one protagonist" style game, as otherwise the secondary protagonists seem to orbit the central protagonist unrealistically on occasion.

The framing part refers to skipping everything that isn't story related. How did Bob get there? Who cares, he's there! How much does it cost? Everything costs either too much or not too much. Unless it's somehow important to the story. Does he have x? Is it cool with respect to the current action? Then yes, he has x. Not to say it's unrealistic; just that this detail isn't covered in play unless it's important to the moral and ethical decisions being made by the character at present.

This all doesn't work with Sim or Gamism, of course. Because in these cases, the source of the fun is in the doing. Watching just makes you itch to do stuff yourself. You feel like you're "falling behind" somehow. This just isn't important in Narrativism where you can be entertained by other character's actions. Makes sense. If it's a story, you'll watch. If it's an imitation of life, you'll get bored watching and want to participate.

That's the theory at least.

Mike

[clehrich]

On the subject of Nar-style scene-cutting, I don't think this is necessarily a Nar thing at all, but that it has been done that way traditionally.  But that's a subject for the GNS forum.

As to protagonism and dominance/spotlighting/etc., both Ron and I had brief threads going a couple weeks ago about this, but they never really took off.  My own contention is that all you need is a clear explanation of the "second banana" or "facilitator" role, and an injunction to be sure and reward such behavior (by whatever methods are locally appropriate), and you're all set.  In my experience, far more problems come from the would-be Alpha-males trying to hog the scene than from the quiet wallflowers.  Rather than being suppressive and telling the former group to stop what they're doing (there's enough such advice around anyway), the important thing is to encourage the wallflowers to make their own role important.

One of the best players I've ever seen, the only one for whom I can't think of any game I wouldn't want him, is very rarely the star of any scene.  He's always the second banana --- but not the silent guy in the back, either.  If someone is in the spotlight, this guy always looks for a way to heighten the action and fun value; if he can't think of one, he just kind of helps maintain things, or sits quietly and enjoys the show.  Very often, though, he can throw in that one little monkey wrench that makes a good scene go brilliantly haywire.  After the game, one has a tendency to remember the star of the scene, but it's usually this guy who really made it happen.  (I'd be happy to give an actual example if anyone wants one.)

As I say, all you need, really, is to make this option clear to everyone, and indicate that it will be rewarded.  This drives the folks who want rewards (often the ones who hog the spotlight, because their real problem is that they're afraid of being left behind) to back up a bit, and those who would rather not star to have a relatively active purpose.  If everyone tries to be the great second banana, the stars will take care of themselves; if everyone tries to be the great star, you can have a hideous mess real fast.  

Multiple running threads doesn't solve this, nor does any formal mechanism I know of.  I think few people have seen the kind of second-banana behavior I'm describing because it's so damn difficult to do, and too few recognize it as a clear goal unto itself.  Once you have lots of people striving for that as a pinnacle of great gaming, your game will be golden.