New World of Darkness, GNS analysis?

[Erling Rognli]

Looking back at the published scenarios White Wolf made for the old World of Darkness it's really quite apparent, at least to me, that the storytelling they envision is actually illusionism with players providing color. The GM's supposed to make things happen, in more or less the right order, and sometimes there are two or three alternative endings. Which in a sense does sound like storytelling to me; in that a story is told. Some of the game texts claim that cooperative storytelling is the actual goal, but as a whole this does not seem to mean cooperative story development, and adressing premise, but illusionism or participationism.

When I read the new game text I could not see this perspective on what storytelling games are having changed. Some mechanics are improved, and there is luckily no published metaplot yet, but many of the improvements seem to be aimed primarily at making gamist player priorities compatible with illusionist gamemastering, and when it concerns published metaplot this is only a matter of time, I'm afraid. A great example is the rule of giving bonus dice for "good descriptions" of actions. The net effect of this rule is pushing the resolution into fortune-at-the-end, though. This works great for making a gamist player provide color in an illusionist context, but it's no good for narrativism.

To me WW come across as having a specific idea about what storytelling in roleplaying games is; the illusionistic telling of stories by the GM with player-provided color and dramatic execution. They are making games that work out from this perspective, aiming for arty GM's who need a low-threshold medium for their stories and a system to accomplish this even if they have players with gamist priorities or gamist habits. In that sense, it should work great in it's undrifted form.

Also, there are some good ideas in their settings, and the rules are quite driftable, so with a bit of insight in the relationship between rules and actual play it should be possible to make the game work out as a narrativistic storytelling game too, if that's what you want.

-E

[Marco]

I can say that module-analysis is, IMO, tricky business. When I set out to write modules they came out railroaded (this is before I got to The Forge). Why was that?

It was because when I based my module on a game I'd run, I wanted to enforce exactly the same experience on the people who played it--since, in my games, which (IMO) were highly fluid, things had developed in a player-driven or even 'random' way, when it came to make a module I put in controls to provide the same thing.

In other cases, I simplified things greatly in order to provide a "complete" document (i.e. to avoid the charges of 'it's not finished'). In one case, I had NPC's doing a lot of the leading simply because they were the characters I had to work with--I had no idea who the players or characters would be in someone else's hands. In other words, with no actual "group" to address, I fell back putting direction in the text in order to link concepts together.

In some cases things explicitly *were* railroaded because the module was some kind of experiment that was entirely unlike the way I ran normal RPG's.

So I'd be careful about judging a game by its modules. I think the expectation for modules is (mostly) what's condsidered here to be railroaded.

Now:

1. My original assumptions were flawed--there are ways to write modules that aren't that deterministic. Of course this is potentially more work for the GM but that's okay. Ron's Sorceror's Scroll is a good way to approach this. A second way is to simply put a detailed starting situation together and then not care or guide the experience any further.

2. Metaplot is something else entirely. I never got into V:tM's meta-plot but having characters show up who are untouchable for reasons not integrated into the game system is, IMO, a kind of explicit illusionism.

What I don't think is that metaplot precludes narrativism. Not by itself (although the way White Wolf may have done it could've--I'm not certain because I haven't looked closely). If the metaplot simply provides background color and the player's play addresses unrelated premises then it shouldn't interfere.

Even if you meet an untouchable character, there's nothing that says it'll be "within your premise" to kill him, for example (and even if it was, I think its an extreme take on Narrativism that any rules-legitimate action must be feasible--I think there are degrees of Narrativism and small blips of meta-plot showing up, even if somewhat theme-related, wouldn't otherwise derail the game).

None of this is to say you're wrong: I haven't read those modules and your analysis may be spot-on. I'm just pointing out that my experience with modules is that the ones I wrote didn't reflect my playstyle--and I wasn't even aware of it until it was pointed out to me.

-Marco

[John Kim]

Looking back at the published scenarios White Wolf made for the old World of Darkness it's really quite apparent, at least to me, that the storytelling they envision is actually illusionism with players providing color. The GM's supposed to make things happen, in more or less the right order, and sometimes there are two or three alternative endings. Which in a sense does sound like storytelling to me; in that a story is told. Some of the game texts claim that cooperative storytelling is the actual goal, but as a whole this does not seem to mean cooperative story development, and adressing premise, but illusionism or participationism.

I agree with Marco that looking at published modules is tricky.  On the one hand, I agree with you.  Modules made by the game publishers are very enlightening regarding their views.  However, linearly-plotted modules are very common -- including for games which have been cited as Narrativist, like Over the Edge or Everway.  Many modern indie games sidestep this by simply not publishing modules (i.e. Universalis, My Life With Master, etc.).  While there is definite logic to this, I don't think that they should be considered more flexible just for not publishing something.  

I guess the gist of this is that I agree that V:tR should be judged harshly for its modules -- but other games need to be judged just as harshly on the same standards.  Adventure modules in general can roughly be broken up into plot-based and location-based.  Location-based will describe a place and characters, and usually have some sketchy "adventure seeds" for use in that place.  Plot-based adventures are usually linear collections of scenes, though there are some notable exceptions.