Looking for narrative adventures and tips on writing them

[rylen dreskin]

Hey,

I'm putting this one in HQ and RPG Theory.  

I like what I've read about narrative games.  But I'm not entirely sure how to put one together.  I've read the basic tips about having relationship maps sketched out, with bangs, and kickers.  I'm going to wait until I have characters and see what they stir up (hopefully a lot.)  But ...

The HQ adventures I've seen in the HQ book and on the web seem pretty standard modules.  Are there any good narrative adventures out there I can look at and see what those writers have done?  Are they more narrative then I realize?  How do I get players to take control of the story?  And how much control should I give?

Thanks for the advice.
Rylen

[hix]

Hi Rylen,

A great sense of how to develop a narrativist module for Heroquest can be found in this thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6696&highlight=souls.

As for your other questions, I'm sure the HQ regulars will be happy to jump in.

Cheers,
Steve.

[Bankuei]

Hi Rylen,

I wrote a good portion of that scenario, and you can find the final form here at Peter Nordstand's site: http://www.geocities.com/doctorpeace/

It's a pretty complex scenario, and probably not the best for beginners to dig into(I got carried away), but its a valid example.  What you'll notice is that you have a set of characters, a serious conflict about to pop off, some ideas and suggestions for how things might get worse, or at least, more interesting, and no actual preplanned events.

As far as setting up Nar adventures, here's my quick and dirty advice:

•Conflict

Come up with a reason that 2 or more people disagree, and such that one or both sides are doing something about it.  You can make things more interesting or complex by picking any person or group, and coming up with another person or group who opposes them, and why.  This reason may be that they are allied to the first group, maybe they have something to gain, or maybe another reason altogether.

•Characters

Then a list of interesting characters, conflicting, allying, in love, rivalries, ambition, lying, cheating, etc.  Get a good feel for the characters, so you can understand how they tick and how things play for them.

•Player Characters

Now, you need to introduce the Player Characters.  Instead of roping them in, I suggest letting them make suggestions about how they're even involved with the conflict.

As far actual play goes, remember that you only need two things to make Narrativist play happen:

-Player input(they have to at least control their characters' decisions)
-Addressing Premise(There's something meaningful going on)

The attitude I take is that its the GM's job to create sticky situations where folks have to make meaningful decisions, and the players answer with their characters actions as statements about the situations.

I would also suggest taking a very close look at the term Author Stance, which doesn't involve the players having to have control over anything more than their characters, but instead allows them to consciously use the OOC information they have to engineer entertaining and plausible situations and actions for their characters.  

Chris

[lightcastle]

Chris,
Thanks for the quick and dirty summary, which is useful.
I've got a question about this as well. Do you come up with the conflict and relationship web before or after creating characters?  Or do you sit down with the players, get some kind of sense of what sort of game they are interested by and what sort of characters they might want to do, and then build the conflict and the web?  

I'm trying to put together a game, and I am hesitant to do too much before I know what the players want here. Is it possible to do it either way, or is it far better to make the conlfict they will be into and then make them create people for it?

[Moah]

I'll chime in with my on question: Should the players have different views on the question (for example, one player supports group A while another supports group B) or should they sit on the same side of the fence?

[lightcastle]

Moah, I think that depends on the players. There are some people who all want to be on the same side. They like the idea of a "party" and don't want to break it up.  

I personally am FAR more interested in situations where they are sympathetic to different sides. The danger there is that it turns into a game of the players against one another, which can be fine for a tight, short story, but some players take it personally.

I think the real fear I've heard from my players as I've told them about trying this is that the everyone will have their own story and it will be them sitting around waiting for their turn to play. I've tried to assure them that the stories will intertwine and they will have to interact (and can decide for themselves what side to be on) but they seem unsure.

[Bankuei]

Hi LC,

It really depends on the players and what comfort level they have with providing the source of conflict.

Some players want the GM to provide a conflict and build their characters around it, and others want to make their characters and have the conflict crafted around them.  Naturally either way it goes, I tailor it towards the players in the end, the real question is whether its the GM or the players who originate most of the ideas for conflict.  

I always ask to get an idea of what players want and let them get as detailed as they want with defining the conflict and situation.  If that detail includes them making their characters, cool.  If not, then I nail it down further and then present some of the situation and setting to them and let them build their characters off of that.

So, talk to your group, open the table for discussion, let them lay it out(sorta like if a group made a kicker), and whatever detail they don't hit, you fill in and bring it back to them.

Chris

[Bankuei]

Hi Moah,

There is no requirement that players should side one way or another.  The only requirement is that the PCs are involved in some fashion, and I try to make that clear from the start that it is the players' responsibility to author that, not to expect me to cajole them into the conflict.

As far as play goes, it can be fun either way.  When different sides are taken, players get to set up a sort of "debate" by way of action during play, which is usually similar in structure to how court drama shows work in a way.  When the same side is taken, the interesting differences come up in "how" to do things or "how far is too far" with regards to acheiving goals(think X-files for perfect example).

On some occassions, I lay down which side of a given conflict the players will be on as part of setting up the situation, such as, "You are all fighting the Dark Lord, now tell me why?"  In this case, the players either agree to the situation or not, explicitly before play begins.  

Does that help at all?

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

Quick Term Nazi note: narrative has a specific meaning that's not being discussed here. Narrativism is a created term from RPG theory with a very specific function, and means something very different. The reason for the distinction is important, as both terms can refer to RPGs - they just do so in very different ways ("The scenario supports narrativism, but likely would have very little narrative from the participants.") I assume that everybody is correct here in assuming that you want to prepare a game to support narrativism?

The writers of HQ were, I think, unaware of the theories here about what sorts of preparation supports narrativism best. No surprise as the ideas about what does are enumerated in the game Sorcerer, and it's supplements primarily, which came about around the same time as HW and then HQ. As such, there are few to no games that include the advice that we give here. To be really clear, outside of The Forge, you're not likely to see much talk about it at all, with the exception of Forge regulars expounding about it on other fora.

That's just to put it in perspective.

Which is all to say that the advantures presented in HQ do about as well as you can to support narrativism without knowing a lot about the theory. That is, the adventures are rife with potential "narrativist moments", but they are presented in a way that might lead a narrator to make actual narrativism difficult or impossible.

Quickly, narrativism is prioritizing the creation of theme in play over other possible priorities. What that means is that in making telling decisions, narrativism is seen as players deciding questions that have thematic potential. This can look like a lot of things, but the one thing that all narrativism has in common is that the players in question have to have the ability to make actual decisions about these things, meaning that the outcomes of the choices have to have a real impact on plot.

So, any adventure that says, "The players will then do X," or even implies such, is militating against narrativism. The primary feature of a GM supporting narrativism is that he has no plot or story in mind, and instead is allowing the players to create the story via the actions of the characters. This is deceptive because GMs think, "I always allow the player to make decisions." But they usually don't, as much as they think they do. "Decisions" in this context doesn't mean deciding what the character says, or what weeapon he uses, but, again must pertain to thematic situations. For example, if the "decision" presented is "Fight or die" and lose your character, that's likely not much of a decision for the player to make. For it to support narrativism, the player must legitamately feel that dying is as good an option thematically as fighting. If any decision is weighted by the GM such that the player would be a sucker for taking it, then the GM is making the decision and forcing the player to take it.


Now, what makes for an appropriate thematic moment for a given character varies from character to character, and even player to player. As such, it's really hard to say what will be weighty enough to count for a given PC. For example, if you present a player whose character is a hardened bloodthirsty warrior with a decision to fight someone or surrender peacefully, it might not be much of a decision. Whereas presenting the same situation to a monk who has taken vows of peace might be.

This is the primary problem with creating pre-fabricated "narrativist" scenarios. Without knowing who the players and their characters are before hand, you have to guess what's appropriate. Now, this isn't completely impossible, but the standard method of getting around the problem is to create conflicts that are universally thematic to almost all characters. For example, if you create a dilemma between supporting a new regime, or an old one, that's pretty broad, and most players can address this with most characters. Still, occasionally a player will come up with a concept that even makes something like this inapplicable.

But, worse than that problem, any such scenario can't be tailored to the specific issues of the character. Let's say that the player creates some half-breed character intent on looking into the culture issue that results. Well, a generic scenario isn't likely to have anything in it specifically that brings out that issue. That's not to say that it can't, or won't, just that the scenario as published isn't likely to focus on the issue at all.

Whereas on the other hand, if you design the scenario after learning about the character, you can do this sort of tailoring. For example, if it turns out that the characters are all hetero males, then the character in the pre-fab scenario intended to bring out female romance issues becomes superfluous - wheras if I know about the character composition, I could have made that guy a girl. Sure, I can change the pre-fab scenario to fit my characters, but if I'm doing that sort of work, then why bother with the pre-fab in the first case?

Now, that's overstating the case. I don't mean to say that the idea is useless.

What I am saying, however, is that any such scenario does well to stay very general, such that it's easy to alter it to fit the characters as presented, and may even have notes on how to alter it to fit.


So, you can see why the prepared scenarios that you may have seen may not do all that they can to support narrativism. The question is, are you writing a generic scenario, or do you have characters in mind alread? The advice on each of these is quite different, IMO.

Mike

[lightcastle]

Hey Mike.  I think you've actually confused me more now because I don't know what post or comment you were addressing.

So how about we put this in a little tighter an example, k?

I've got some players who I am trying to get together to play HQ. We've had some email discussions but that's all so far, trying to sound out idea on what sort of game they want, what sort of story they want to be involved with creating.

So far, those who have answered have expressed an interest in doing a shades of grey kind of thing, where they have overlapping yet somewhat conflicting goals. Each can be a hero in their own right, but are looking at things from different perspectives, and so they will find themselves in conflict/competition.

So basically they don't want to be an adventuring party, they want to be a group of interacting people.

I still need to sit down with them (they don't know the world) and bounce more ideas around.

Now, as it is, just that idea (assuming this seems to stick across the board with everyone as a fun idea) made me think of sticking them in some kind of Casablanca-like port (maybe Refuge or Nochet or Karse) where everything's for sale and lots of different groups are active. Beyond that I don't want to speculate until they start to get a firmer idea of their characters and what those characters are after. (If they all are hunting forbidden knowledge, I need to detail different NPCs for them to bump into than if they are all trying to raise armies against the Lunars.)

So am I right to keep this nice and sketchy at this stage until they start to give me some direction?

LC

[Moah]

Whatever you do, DON'T MENTION THE DUCKS!

[lightcastle]

The ducks will come when they come, of course.

:)

[Mike Holmes]

LC, perfect AFAICT. What's confusing?

Mike

[lightcastle]

LC, perfect AFAICT. What's confusing?

The "I've never done this before and am tryig something new" part. :)

I've often ended up gradually working more narrativist elements into my games, but this is the first time I'm trying to go in straight up with this approach in mind.  It's a little daunting to let go. :)

[Bankuei]

Hi LC,

Glorantha is a world where if the players aren't familiar with it, it'll overwhelm them and they'll feel lost.  I recommend choosing a location with only 2 or 3 groups in conflict.  These  groups can be from the same culture, which might be an easier transition for your players to get used to, rather than trying to learn several cultures at once.  If you want to go multicultural, take some effort to clearly show the main points of each.

Produce the location, the conflict, and present that to the players.  Let them choose where they stand on the conflict, and how they got involved.  

Another useful trick I use for "highlighting" a conflict, is for each major group involved, I create an NPC who figureheads a specific outlook or view towards the conflict.  Then I give the the figurehead 2 other NPCs who show different outlooks on it, giving room for some inter-group conflict.  The classic example is Star Trek, where you have Kirk, plus Bones and Spock giving two different views to any conflict.

Since you're just starting nar play, I wouldn't make the conflict huge, but keep it tight and simple.  If you were using the Well of Souls, I would just focus on Hugo, Gilbert, Lord Eustef and Sir Serge, and relegate everyone else to background characters.  In other words, choose a no more than 3 or 4 figureheads, and kick the conflict and let it fly.

Chris