Yet Another Fantasy Game

[SlurpeeMoney]

I will not claim for even a moment to know the full scope and breadth of our great hobby, but it seems to me that very few games, if any at all, have done anything in the True Fantasy genre. For the most part, games in the Fantasy genre tend to focus on historical or Epic fantasy, leaving the slightly-off-kilter stories of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and the Chronicles of Narnia off on their own as a purely literary (and, occasionally, Hollywood) media. Is there a place for True Fantasy in role-playing? If there is, how would one create rules for setting in which the player-character's psyche's dominate the setting? How would one build a plot as fluid, as changable and as reflectory as that of Gormenghast or The Gunslinger? How would one support play like that with system? Would you even need a system, or would freeform be the way to go?

If anyone has played with this, I would love to know what you did and how you did it. It's been one of those concepts that's been floating about in my head for quite some time. Here are a few of the ideas I've had in regards to making it work. I invite criticism and more ideas, as they come to you.

Extreme Dramatic Editing.
Without this, it would be impossible for the Game Master, if one were present, to truly get into the player's heads regarding their characters. If players are free to simply add or remove setting and plot elements as per their character's psyche, one could possibly get a feel for who that character is via the externalization of the internal. I did this the other day in a Witchcraft one-shot. The game started off with a Kicker, and every few minutes, I would ask one of the players for a new complication, giving them complete control of the horrors that they were facing. (As an aside, players are typically much more cruel to their own characters than I would ever be as a Game Master). The result was a horror game that lost all feel for standard, typical reality, but gained a level of surrealism and emotional externalization that I found, at the time, quite bewildering. Thinking back on it, it seems to fit perfectly with the mood of the stories of True Fantasy.

The Nature of Dreams
In a dream it is possible for you to accomplish anything that needs accomplishing, simply by the wishing of it, or, occasionally, even by the thought of it. It is when the wishing and the thoughts get out of control that we have nightmares, in which we can become incapable of any kind of action, due only to the fact that we believe ourselves incapable of it. Making this work with character creation would be difficult, if not impossible. However, High Fantasy demands a dreamlike quality to all of the aspects of the story, and so characters become dream-things. This would mean, of course, very fast-and-loose character creation, allowing for any ability one can think of, and having the ability to change it at a whim.
The system for Puppetland is a great example of how this could be done. Making statements about your character, you create that character. "I am a one-eyed-one-horned-flying-purple-people-eater." "I am not a race-car driver." "I can fly, eat people, and ram them with my horn." "I cannot fall in love, talk to insects or play with my toes." Now, this is a much more extreme version of the Puppetland character creation scheme (at least in Puppetland, there are borders; all characters are puppets), but it serves two purposes as a demonstration: 1) it allows us to know what your character is and what it can do and 2) it gives the Game Master and the fellow players something to work with in regards to your character's weakness. Your one-eyed-one-horned-flying-purple-people-eater can't talk to insects? Well, that immediately impliest that, at some point during this game, there will be insects that either can talk, or that need talking to. Can't play with your toes? At what point during the game are you going to need to play with your toes? Where is this important? Can you make it important to the flow of the game?
At any time during the game, it would be possible for the Game Master or your fellow players to affect your character, either giving you something new that you are or you can do, or presenting you with a new limitation, what you are not, and what you cannot do. There would be a system for this, so that it does not get out of hand, but it shows how one character is affected by the psyche of the other character's in a High Fantasy game.

High Concepts
The majority of games played in a High Fantasy setting should not include one-eyed-one-horned-flying-purple-people-eaters. They should involve people. For a character such as Peter Pan, his character sheet may look something like: I am a boy. I am not a pirate. I can fly, crow like a cock, and fight. I cannot grow up, remember my mother, or find my shadow. All of these things are perfectly suitable for a High Fantasy game, and give us an idea about the story behind Peter Pan.
All High Fantasy stories need a concept behind them that unifies the story that is being told. To say that Through the Looking Glass has no concept would be quite misleading. One of its key concepts is curiosity, more to the point, how curiosity can be detrimental to the living of a long and healthy life. Naturally, then, it's protagonist is a curious person.
Should the game have a Game Master, it would be important for the Game Master to develop a strong concept that would incorporate a group of individuals into the shifting and changing world of the setting. World building, then, would be less important than concept building, and those concepts would be of utmost importance to the story and the characters involved therein.

There we are. My ideas on High Fantasy role-playing. Whew.

SlurpeeMoney
"I can fly! No... No... I can fall... A lot..."

[b_bankhead]

Think the word you are looking for is 'fairy tale'.  Yes rpg-land is filled with the 'fey' these days, but those games aren't about the logic and structure of the traditional fairy tale, they are mostly about 'could Oberon beat Titania armwrestling"?

It should be possible to make a good narrativist fairy tale game. The logic and structure of the traditiona fairy is surprisingly rigid, and good lists of frequently repeated themes exist all over the place.

This looks like a good place to start:

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/introduction/ftdefinition.html

[SlurpeeMoney]

Most good fairy tales do, in fact, incorporate a good deal of Traditional Fantasy elements. Fairy tales, though, are not the whole of the sub-genre, much as highly detailed dodecologies are not the whole of the Epic Fantasy subgenre. Few would be able to qualify Gormenghast as a fairy tale in good conscience, nor would they do so with Alice in Wonderland, The Gunslinger or Neverwhere. All of these incorporate elements of Traditional Fantasy, which is, so far as I've read, stories in which the Externalization of the Internal Emotions of the protagonists is key. Elements of story that are often left to reason or reality seem often strange and unmatched when taken out of context, but when compared to the protagonists' psyche, fit into the story. In fact, when reading such a story, one seldom stops to consider such out-of-the-ordinary events, as they are so integrally linked to the off-the-wall setting, also a product of the protagonists' psychological journey.

Fairy tales are a great place to start, though. Many of the best fairy tales would make incredible games, though there are, admittedly, a great deal of stories that would be much harder to work into a role-playing format. I could not see myself role-playing Sleeping Beauty without it taking on an identifiably Shrek-ish turn.

What I am looking for, more specifically, are ideas on how to build settings and plot events on the fly, with some structure to help less imaginative Game Masters (I played with one last night, and he tried to incorporate mid-game kickers; it was awful) create and build based on what the players give them. The greatest thing about this sub-genre is that the plot points and setting props do not neccessarilly have to make sense, but they do have to represent, in some way, the current psychological challenges of the characters involved. How does one build a game that is not about the characters, but is instead about how the characters feel?

This, of course, easilly branches into horror, the world's best examples of the Externalization of the Internal. Nothing is more internal than our fears, and nothing externalizes those fears better than having them sicked on us in real life. How do you make this personal for your characters without having to ask them, every ten minutes, "How does that make you feel?"?

Character creation is, as I've said, the easy part. We have rules established for the sharing of narrative power, though I think most of the standard examples (drama points, kickers, Monologues) would need serious editing in order to make them playable with this style of game. Would you bother with most of the mainstays of fantasy gaming? How would you work combat to take advantage of the fact that reality shifts with your state of mind? Would damage really hurt you, or would your pain make you stronger? Would emotional hurt be more important than the physical, or would physical hurt somehow effect how your role in the sharing of psychological reality? Can your belief in fairies bring Tinkerbell back to life (sorry; just watched Peter Pan)? If so, how would that affect killing characters, both player characters and non-player characters? If you kill a part of your psyche that you want dead, does it really die, or do you simply triumph over it for a time, until another part of you needs it back?

SlurpeeMoney
"If I could answer all of these questions myself, I'd be a game designer."

[beingfrank]

I play in a PBeM, called The Glitter and the Glamour, that attempts similar things with, in my opinion, remarkable success.  It has a strong Fairy Tale and epic style.  It mostly seems to work by rigorously ensuring that the players and the GM are on the same page and by getting the players to do much of the work.  I want the game to reflect my character's feelings, I write it that way (and I do).

Not sure it would work FTF, but maybe looking at how this game works will help.

I can answer more of your questions in the context of this game if you think it would help, as an example of one approach.

[simon_hibbs]