Structural Aesthetics vs. Story Now

[jburneko]

Hello All,

This will get around to Actual Play eventually, if it evolves too much into more theoretical GNS discussion, feel free to move it.

Structural Aesthetics play a HUGE HUGE role in my enjoyment of stories in any media.  In addition to a great story having a compelling character in a compelling situation, I need the elements that make up that story, situation and character arranged, "just so."

Examples from non-roleplaying media:

The first season of 24 (only season I've seen) really irked me.  I don't think the show ever once lost sight of Bauer and Palmer's Job vs Family and Moral Integrity issues but the situation that expressed that conflict evolved way too eratically for my tastes.  The very initial assassination plot was over by episode six, the family was rescued by episode 12 and the whole first group of terrorists was taken out by episode 15.  Ultimately, the END situation didn't resemble the START situation at all even though the central conflict had not yet been resolved.

Contrast this with Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  That show feels very deliberately constructed.  There isn't a single element that isn't placed EXACTLY where it's supposed to be placed.  The climax of every season of Buffy is like an inflated version of the beginning of that season.  You get the sense that this is the point the authors have been building to all along.  Every character failure, every character success was carefully choosen and engineered for this moment right here.

To sum it up 24 evolves while Buffy builds.  I feel like the authors of 24 were willing to play around with situation and just focus on their character's actions and what consequences those actions might have so long as they didn't lose sight of the central Premise.  If they ran out of Situation before episode eight, no problem just make up some new situation.  Buffy on the other hand feels like the ending was chosen and planned FIRST and everything else reverse engineered backwards to get us (the audience) there.

I hope what I'm getting at is pretty clear.  Yes, I'm talking about single author media but the terms I'm putting each into is EXACTLY how I'd describe Story Now (24) vs. Illusionism (Buffy).  The conflict is this, I prefer the engineered feel of Buffy over the in-the-moment evolved feel of 24 but I do NOT like engineering my roleplaying.  The problem is compounded for my group because many of them ALSO enjoy the engineered feel.

So let's take this concept to roleplaying in general.  In another thread someone mentioned that they had this idea for playing a Buffy game which involved a conspiracy of rogue slayers outside the PC controlled slayer council.  Joshua Neff mentioned that he'd make this a bang "Bam!  There's this conspiracy of "good guys" outside your control what are you gonna do about it?"

Here's my issue.  I agree with him.  It's a bang.  But in Buffy terms (from my structural aesthetic standpoint) it's a 12th episode bang.  And this is where I often get stuck while preping scenarios.  I get very invested in a central conflict that I want to see the players grapple with BUT throwing that conflict at the players right out of the gate feels structurally wrong to me.    So, I get stuck either not being able to think of anything that structually feels like an episode 1 conflict OR by the time we've generated 12 episodes worth of play the original idea no longer fits the structural aesthetic of the moment and I end up abandoning the idea I was all fired up about in the first place.

An example from actual play.  In my Eden Falls game the player behind Brother Denis, the Doubting Thomas, Gregor Mendel inspired monk, and I share a very similar structural aesthetic.  Just after one of the sessions the player behind John Devine, the ex-con with the vision of hell, mentioned that his character was headed for self destruction.  Brother Denis's player mentioned that he thought it would be cool if his character had a hand in that destruction.

So, I resolved that I would give Brother Denis's player an opening the next session to angle his character toward's John Devine.  Here's what I did.  Brother Denis's player stated at the end of the session that he was going to go visit the "reverend-mayor" to organize a town prayer meeting over some recent death that had happend (John Devine being behind some of those deaths).  I had already decided that the "reverend-mayor" was going to call off the police search for John Devine because as far as he was concerned John Devine was doing him a favor by cleaning up the city's "sinners."

So, when Brother Denis asked the Reverend-Mayor if he could hold a prayer meeting I had the Reverend-Mayor put a condition on it.  He took Brother Denis into his confidence and explained that he had called off the police search and why.  He then said that he had doubts and because of Brother Denis's recognized scientific background, he wanted him to independently confirm whether John Devine was an Avenging Angle or a Demon.  Brother Denis agreed and then all kinds of very satisfying coolness happened between John Devine and Brother Denis.

But the scene that got us to that coolness felt structurally wrong.  Why would the Reverend-Mayor take Brother Denis into his confidence so fast?  They're of opposing faiths (Catholic vs. Protestant).  Up until that point the Reverend-Mayor was portrayed as power-hungry ego maniac, why the self doubt?  I didn't have a problem with what the Reverend-Mayor did over all, I had a problem WHEN he did it.

Structurally I felt like there should have been a session or two establishing some kind of trust or understanding between Brother Denis and the Reverend-Mayor, that's what I would have done had I been writing this story on my own.  But by that point John Devine (a PC, remember) may have moved on to other things and the opportunity for Brother Denis to be involved may have passed by or weakend.  So I surpressed the Structural Aesthetic in favor of Story Now.

Afterwards I briefly discussed all of this with Brother Denis's player and he agreed with me.  He was very surprised at the Reverend-Mayor's actions but was willing to roll with it.  But I think we both were left with this sense that we had somehow cheated.  We had gotten to London and had an awesome time at Big Ben but we took a plane when we should have taken a boat or at least we should have stopped off a The Crown Jewels before going to Big Ben.

So here's my question: Is what I'm calling Structural Aesthetic a facet of Simulationism (High-Concept or Illusionism) and really does conflict with Story Now or is there a way to preserve the Structural Aesthetic without missing Story Now opportunities.  Do any of you share such a structural aesthetic and when and how do you indulge/supress/harmonize with it in your own play?

This feeds into Ron's band analogy, specifically jazz bands.  The passion of an in the moment jazz solo is an amazing thing but nothing beats the structural precision and timing of a Vivaldi Concerto.

Thoughts?

Jesse

[pete_darby]

It's here that I start going nucking futs, running around and chasing my tail, and saying, Matt Wilson, Publish Primetime Adventures NOW!!!

And breath....

Never mind that Matt's written his game around emulating just the kind of shows you describe, the screen presence system, where the focus character & issue of each "episode" is plotted out at the outset of the "season." With a bit of judicious co-operation between players choosing their presence ratings across the season, a "natural" arc arises from the episodes.

I'd suggest the producer of PtA should work in ye olde Uber-plot in the sessions with relatively low aggregate screen presence, or fit the U-p into the issues of the players with higher presence in the latter stages of the season... but I'm rabitting on about PtA esoterica, and I should save it for Matt's first supplement...

So, yanking my drift back: structural aesthetic opposed to story now? No way, no how, nuh-uh. Unless you've already decided which story you're telling now...

In your example, you were focussed on the story of the nature of John Devine. In order to feed that story now, you fudged a nascent lead up story, and you felt that immediately afterwards. The lead up story, why should a bigotted protestant trust a scientific catholic, was passed up in your enthusiasm. But it's not Structural Aesthetic vs Story Now, it's This Story Now Vs That Story Now, and if you're lucky enough to get the insight that This Story helps build the drama of That Story, then you're pretty sure about which to go for first.

But I think we've all seen serial entertainments when that's flubbed, when subplots fizzle, or unexpectedly resolve, but it's the nature of the beast: when you're laying track in front of the speeding train, sometimes you take it by a suboptimal route, but if you'd plotted the track first, it wouldn't be as much fun...

[GreatWolf]

I remember reading the intro to one of the Sandman trade paperback, noting some of the difficulties inherent in serial media:  specifically, the inability to tinker with past episodes.  Once it is published, it is set in stone.  As a result, sometimes weirdness happens.  The skill is in being able to take your mistakes and incorporate them into the larger story.

So, back to your example, why did the Reverend-Mayor trust Brother Denis?  There must be an answer; after all, it happened.  But what is it?  Hmm, the plot thickens.....

As I recall, Jesse, you're a computer programmer.  Therefore, you must be familiar with the phrase "That's not a bug; that's an undocumented feature."  Behind this phrase is the assumed ability to take an apparent shortcoming or surprising emergent behavior of a piece of code and turn it into an advantage.  This situation is the same.  The Reverend-Mayor's actions aren't a bug; they are an undocumented feature.  And what is that feature?  Well, only you and your players can figure that out....

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[DannyK]

What they said.  This kind of gaming is pretty dynamic: if you refuse to serve dessert until the players finish their peas, you may find dessert no longer available.  

I've noticed a similar feeling in my GMing lately since I started becoming aware of all these Forge-ish gaming concept.  Sometimes a scene will jump in an odd direction or skip encounters that I'd expected to be able to work in.  It leaves me with an odd feeling of guilt, as if I were a bad GM for not "using" all my "stuff".  I try to reassure myself that there's an infinite amount of "stuff" out there, and that I can probably recycle some of the "stuff" that didn't get used in a different context.  

And yeah, those weird plot twists can give rise to new developments and Bangs in future sessions.  To take the example you mentioned, maybe there's some reason for the Reverend-Mayor to trust Brother Denis that will later surface.  Another interesting idea is to look at what happens now with the Reverend-Mayor; will he approach his rule of the town, and the PC's, in the same way.  

Hmm.  I didn't really address your question too well.  I guess I like both Miles Davis and Vivaldi, but it would be hard to find the a musical group that could play both equally well.  

DannyK

[DevP]

Some games (like MLwM) take a rigid narrative structure for granted, and I think there can be a lot of cool to be found in that. Here's an idea, sorta conned off what I heard from Jared at VeriCon

On 10 index cards, a GM writes 3 "jobs" (i.e. one-off excursions which may incur interesting twists but not excessively impact the Plot Arc except by Color foreshadowing), 6 "plot points" (specific clues or events that Will Happen), and 1 Boss Card (i.e. the Big Bad).

Each session, the GM will reveal one, and reveal it openly. The players understand that This Will Happen, and work towards it - it's part of the social contract. Ultimately, these events will add up to a final confrontation (combatative, metaphorical or otherwise), and thus end the arc.

What matter is how each player interacts with each other. Playing out of player relationships is rewarded by essentially building up a resource pool they can draw from; therefore, consistently escalating the intraparty relationships/conflicts will boost the resources available for Final Confronation.

Another way to think about it would be to patch InSpectres: not only does each session have X number of Job Dice to earn, but over several sessions you want to earn X Plot Arc dice in order to have the Final Big Bad be revealed, and then you have a session devoted exclusively with dealing with it alone.

The key thing is not to make it just illusion: the other players know that the "One Of The Crew Will Die" event will happen in tonight's game, and they will make sure not to derail it; but this Plot Point is the GM's authoring, and its exact implementation is under the GM's control, given the constraints of the players' motivations and events. (So, you can still try to Wow your players by killing off the most-loved supporting character without remorse, or such.)

It is important that the Plot Points be vague, e.g. "The Crew make an emergency crash-landing on a desert planet, and are forced to make an uneasy alliance with the natives. But the planet has a surprise none of them will expect..." You still have LOTS of degrees of freedom, and you can base the exact implementation of future plot points based on how this current one is carried out.

[Jason Lee]

Honestly, I think your method was good.  What you did got you to the coolness, you just didn't quite like how it got you there.  In order to get this effect I scheme with the other players.  If I was playing Brother Denis I would have planned an idea with the player of John Devine.  "Hey, when you get a chance do blah, so I can do blah, and coolness can happen."  Which is really all you did, you just might need more open negotiation of events to make the 'how' more believable to you.

(BTW - I don't think they are in conflict.)

[beingfrank]

So here's my question: Is what I'm calling Structural Aesthetic a facet of Simulationism (High-Concept or Illusionism) and really does conflict with Story Now or is there a way to preserve the Structural Aesthetic without missing Story Now opportunities.  Do any of you share such a structural aesthetic and when and how do you indulge/supress/harmonize with it in your own play?

I try to work that sort of structural aesthetic in my own play, as a player.

My gut reaction is that it requires thinking on two levels to make it work (and I'm not at all confident that I achieve that).  At one level you do the normal Story Now kind of play.  On the other, at various intervals, you decide how as much of it as possible fits into the big overall story arc.  In this, a crowbar is your friend, and so is patience.  If you try to make the intervals too short, there isn't much to work with, so trying it together seems really forced.  But over a longer interval, it becomes much easier and more rewarding.

In one game I play in we're up to over 100 sessions.  I try to review what's happening in my character's story about ever 15-20 sessions and try to tie things together.  I also keep an eye on my logs of past session, particularly those 50 or 100 sessions ago.  I managed something I'm kind of proud of along those lines recently.

In session 19 my character was very unhappy, lost her temper thoroughly and expressed her anger by sticking an axe in another PC's door.  Way to make a reputation.  It's an incident that's followed the character ever since.  But a lot has changed since then and some things have come full circle.  So in session 119, when the King my character serves is about to go into battle, and tells my character who he wants to succeed him should he die (Ok, this is Amber, so it's a big deal), I choose to have my character tell him that she'll respect and protect his wishes by telling him that she'll 'take an axe and make it [putting his candidate on the throne] happen, if necessary.'

It's a small thing, but it provides a nice little 'ah, so that's what it's about, this has been coming since ep 5 and I didn't see it clearly until now' moment for the rest of the group, which is one of the things I like in that sort of structural aesthetic approach.

It's a minor thing, but it doesn't require radical changes to the way one plays a game, and it provides some of that feeling of coolness.  A band aid solution, rather than a total reworking, as it were.

Claire Bickell [edited to add my name because I forgot it the first time, idiot!]

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Jesse, you're just talking about structural features within a Narrativist context. And bluntly, you're also talking about issues of uber-control - can the GM rely on X being still viable as a Bang several sessions down the road.

What can I tell you, but that you have a very, very simple choice:

1) Bang it now, "early" by your estimation. Your saga just became a short story. OK.

2) Wait. And then who knows? Either you apply the Bang as planned, much later, or you apply it a bit earlier or with some modifications based on intervening material, or you bag it because it's totally irrelevant given what's happened.

Flexibility, Jesse. You can't make the story the way you want as a Narrativist GM - or hell, as a Narrativist participant of any kind. You can contribute according to the real-people role that you play in that particular group, just as everyone else can, indvidually. That's it.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

For me, the way to do this is to have a Plot that has a fixed arc.  You know, Exposition, Tension, Climax, Resolution.  It's just that nobody has any idea what goes in each box.

So at the start, it's clearly Exposition, because what else would it be?  But then the group has to decide at the end of each session whether they've shifted stage.  Thus when the Plot is in Climax, you know that what's happening can't suddenly turn into basic exposition again.  It has to go toward the Big Bang.  Again, you don't know how or when, but it has to go there.

A concept for this that I think Mike Holmes is currently playtesting is to have each PC have his or her own Plot, with its own Stages.  You have to work it a bit at the start so that everyone's off-cycle from each other, but once it's rolling, if you have 4 players, you can only have 2 per Stage and they should be at far ends of it; the idea is to have one of each Stage without forcing it.  That way something is always climaxing, and there's no real way to stop -- it just keeps going.  The idea is that it turns into a soap opera: always on the boil, right now, but never quite getting to the end of the story.

Anyway, I don't think this kind of structural aesthetic is naturally antithetical to Narrativist play, or in fact to any kind of play.  It's just a question of how long the Story in question is, and there can be lots of different stories of various sizes all at once.

Chris Lehrich

[joshua neff]

Jesse, have you read any interviews with Joss Whedon or the other Buffy writers? Or watched any of the episodes on DVD with commentary? If you have, then you know that Buffy is anything but deliberately constructed. The writers are making it up as they go along. "Who's the Big Bad of the season? Well, we just introduced the mayor. He seems pretty compelling--let's make him into black magic & have him be the Big Bad." If the show seems deliberately & tightly constructed, it's only a tribute to the jazzy improv abilities of the writers.

When I talked about the Slayer conspiracy Bang, I definitely meant it as the kind of Bang that can be used in many different ways, changed, inverted, or dropped because it no longer fits in the game as it's being played. Or simply make it part of the background, like the Hero Wars in Glorantha.  When I run HeroQuest, I figure the Hero Wars will happen regardless of what the PCs do--but the Hero Wars will only have meaning in relation to the PCs. So, if the players don't care one whit about the Hero Wars & ignore them--it's just background stuff to what they do. (To the heroes in Buffy, the battle against the First is an epic, meaningful, tragic battle. To the heroes in Angel it's, "Oh, did something happen in Sunnydale? Okay, whatever.")

My point being: I agree with Ron. If you want to play Simulationist, play Simulationist. No one's going to think any less of you if you want to run games in which the structure is tightly controlled & Story Isn't Now. But if you want to run Narrativist, you have to be willing to give up some control & accept that when a story is being written, at the exact moment of its writing, it's not necessarily tightly constructed. That doesn't mean you can't have a Narrativist game with some structure to it. The group can agree that, say, one session is like one episode of a TV show, & we have to end on a denoument for each session. And everyone can jam with that structure. But a Vivaldi piece? I dunno.

[hix]

Referring to the Slayer Conspiracy example, I'm intending to play the season out over the course of about five episodes.*

The point is: the way I'm running this Buffy game is to focus purely on the seasonal A-plot without any 'Monster of the Week' episodes. Therefore, dropping in the Conspiracy in the first or even the second session feels about right in terms of raising the stakes.

Basically (and thanks for all the advice about bangs in the previous thread) I'm seeing it as a context for the players to make decisions about who they ally with. That conspiracy plus two other self-interested power groups will create the drive towards whatever-unimagined-by-me climax in the game.

In that sense, Jesse: what you referred to as a "12th session bang" in the first post, I just see as one of about three big backstory bits of information that I can reveal whenever it seems fit.

Cheers,
Steve

*  Props to PrimeTime Adventures for pointing out that 5-9 sessions seems to feel like a season (or at least a mini-series) in role-playing years.

[Valamir]

I just wanted to pop in and focus on Claire's post above.

That post sums up very nicely the points I've frequently tried to make about the powerful positive impact that allowing the players to engage directly with each other and the story through meta gaming can have to make the game experience better for everyone at the table.

I think we who are comfortable with thinking in terms of the metagame sometimes forget how powerful a tool it is to guide and correct structural issues during play.

Seth's comment above goes right into this.  A certain level of disatisfaction with the end result is pretty much inevitable in any improv because of the nature of the art.  But metagame tools give us the ability to patch over and smooth out that disatisfaction, what Fang had called No Myth.

Something happened that based on the information available to all parties concerned, including the GM, didn't really make alot of sense.  A structured play set up might have shelved the idea for later, for use when it did make more sense; addressing the problem by avoiding.

In a more aggressive bang driven "story now" style, you're left with an event that doesn't make total sense, and yet it happened.  That's not an insurmountable hurdle.  As Seth indicates, one only has to figure out what "stuff" that no one yet knows about made that event justifiable.

Players are perfectly capable of helping to fit that in also.  Your talking to your player is not, to me, a sign of defeat.  But the first step in recruiting another players cooperation.  "hey, did this feel right to you?... no?  Me either.  Sometime in the next session or two we're going to need to introduce something to explain why he was so eager to do this with you...give it some thought".

Badda bing.

[Sean]

Narrativism is Jazz and Simulationist/Story is Classical. I like it.

It's all wrong as a statement of fact, of course. You can get jazzy, multidimensional stuff with lots of improv out of one author, and tightly orchestrated stuff out of many.

So it's not about the product that comes out, but the process that makes it. Is it a lot of musicians trying to make something together, working with each others' ideas, riffing off each other, and the like, or is it a matter of each person getting their part in advance and then playing it to the best of their ability?

Both can make great music - it's just about how you want to go about making it.

[jburneko]

Wow.  This topic exploded.  Thanks for all the input.

Let me address the control issue.  I wanted to make it clear that this is mostly about myself and the standards I hold myself to during prep and play.  I'm usually pretty cool about what the players throw at me.  

What I'm trying to parse out is what the gut level reaction I'm having to this issue is indicative of.  Is it infact a desire for more centralized control of the story in which case I have to decide what that means to me and my own enjoyment or is it more of a practice thing regarding breaking bangs down into smaller pieces and facilitating better meta-game talk about things that irk me and other players.

I guess the answer seems it could be either and I just have decide which it is to me.

So here's another example.  Next Tuesday we start up the second Eden Falls scenario.   The group has agreed to set it against the backdrop of a mayorial election.   Two PCs have a stake in this election directly.  Hannah, the decendent of the founders of the city, is running for election against the Reverend-Mayor and Ephiny, the greek warrior prophet, who convinced Hannah to run in the first place and late in the last scenario started trying to turn key council members against the Reverend-Mayor.

(Interesting Side Story: The other night I was discussing this with John Devine's player.  When I mentioned that Ephiny had a stake in the election he looked at me with suprise and asked, "Why?"  I said, "Haven't you seen the look on Ephiny's player's face everytime ousting the Reverend-Mayor has been even a slight possibility.  She's had it out for him ever since I first brought him into the game."  He said, "Yes, but why does *EPHINY* have a stake in the election."  I said, "If you'd like more justification from Ephiny's player why not just ask her?")

Anyway, so here's what I've come up with: There's this cult that's worshiping one of the greek gods (haven't made up my mind which yet, I'm leaning towards Ares).  They are beseeching the god to use his power to sway the election.  Afterall the Reverend-Mayor is a self-righteous fundamentalist and they're basically pagan.  In return, the god is demanding the death of the baby that was such a big deal in the last scenario and is now in the charge of another PC, the devine sorcerer charged with guarding the words of creation now in the form of this baby.

So *wham* in one blow I've tied three out of five PCs together in one go.  How will Ephiny react to this group who share her religion and goals but are demanding the death of a child of a friend?  How does Hannah feel about having the outcome of her election supernaturally swayed?  What's Dumah (the devine sorcerer) going to do to protect the child?

I was going to start the session out right with cultists trying to recruit Ephiny and kidnap the child.  But damn, that's a crazy start.  What I'd like to do is engender a creeping feeling that a third party is manipulating things behind the scenes BEFORE hiting them with all of the above.  But that means the PCs would have to be engaged with something else and something a wee bit smaller but there I'm drawing a blank.  I'd rather go ahead and "turn my saga into a short story" as Ron put it than have the PCs wandering around doing nothing while I establish a creeping feeling.

(Note: This seems to be a universal problem among gamers.  The "How To Run a Creeping Conspiracy Story" because usually during the "creeping" phase the PCs have nothing to do but watch the creep and hope they gather enough info to discover the conspiracy.  Kind of boring.  This is perhaps worthy of its own thread).

I suppose one solution (as some of you have suggested) is to retro-justify any lingering "plot holes" from the last scenario with these guys.  The Reverend-Mayor was manipulated into bringing in a third party on the John Devine case for some reason by these guys.  That sort of thing.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

Unfortunately, the only teaching-analogies I can come up with are crude. I'm forced to reach for the classics, specifically The Meaning of Life, and quote John Cleese:

"Why not try a kiss first? Before you go galloping for the clitoris?"

The idea is that you want to establish a creeping feeling. You know what? You can't. You can't establish a feeling. You can only provide imaginative input. So, fine! Come up with some input that creeps you out, deliver it  during play in a way that does creep you out at the time, and enjoy it! There. All solved. Whether the other people in question get a creeping feeling is up to them, and up to whatever dynamic you all have established to communicate with one another and to reinforce one another's enjoyment.

The input I'm talking about is Cleese's "kiss." You can't have it both ways - "Hey everyone, this is a little something that lets you know something else which is really cool is coming later." But a kiss is a pretty nice thing all on its own. Whatever input you want to provide should play this role, without (a) being trivial about its own value or (b) gaining its only value from your insistence that it's about something that isn't happening yet.

Best,
Ron