How story evolves over time

[Sydney Freedberg]

Light bulbs going on, I think.

That climax could not possibly have the same depth and richness of meaning if it occurred immediately after the first scene

Flipside: Having that climax out ahead of you gives both resonance and direction to all the lesser scenes between The Beginning and The End of the story-arc. Rather as the inevitable end of the Master, and the very uncertain but final fates of the individual minions, shapes every small thing that happens in a game of My Life with Master. Compare and contrast your archetypically D&Disfunctional "epic" campaign, with years of blundering about from 1st level weenies to 20th level demigods in the vague hope of ouija-boarding your way towards a Story: God forbid that we just tell the DM what kind of ending we'd like!

In fact, the more I come to think about it, when a player says "I want this to happen eventually," that ending is actually of purely secondary interest (often): The real desire is to have the scenes leading up to it. E.g. we're not playing in a great rush towards the climactic fight with the bad guy, or overcoming our inner fears, or whatever, but rather we're using those foregone conclusions to add relish to lots of scenes of running away from the bad guy, training by painting the fence, etc. etc.

[TonyLB]

Like Fates in Mountain Witch or an approaching spotlight episode in PTA, yes.

[Mike Holmes]

So, to turn your question around:  the very next scene, the one that's about to happen, that has a certain place in the story.  It may not be a very important place, no matter how hard I try in this moment.  Why should I limit my efforts to effecting that scene, when all of the story, past, present and future are available for me to fiddle with?

Keep in mind that this is just my and Tim's predilictions showing here, and I have no idea how many people share these preferences. But the answer to the question is that I personally don't want to create anything out in the future of the story because even if I know that it might change before we get to it, while it hasn't changed, the intervening play has to be about getting to what's been established already. That is, it's not creative work, it's just filling in the gaps.

One time we were playing Universalis and just to try out the rules, following a scene of carnage, a player jumped to a scene a year previous. We all sort of decided at that point to have all of the scenes proceed from the earlier point with the goal of making sense of the first scene which would be chronologically last. Well, we did have some fun trying to figure out the stuff in between. But the problem was the same one that I had watching SW Episode 3. I already knew how it ended. And that killed a lot of the fun for me.

One of the things with Universalis that I was really worried about for a while in design was that there would be no suspense in play, since the player was making up not just the protagonist action, but the antagonist action. We avoided the "Chalk Outlines" problem of having players present their own characters with opposition, but I still worried that, being able to affect outcome, players would plan ahead, and thus lose the sense of anticipation.

Well, it turns out that even with two players, and moreso with more, that this isn't true because of the simple fact that you don't know what the other players are going to do, and so you really can't plan a lot. You can have general ideas, sure, but this is really no different than guessing that Frodo is going to end up in Mordor when you first hear about it. What you don't know is whether or not he'll end up there for sure, or if anyone besides yourself wants that to happen. All such planning gets tossed to the wind occasionally when some player has Frodo veer off to take care of Saruman instead, and Merry ends up going to Mordor.

It's the surprise of where the story goes that's the most entertaining part, and the thing that really surprised me about Universalis. To the extent that the future of the story is known, the surprise is taken away, and the less entertaining it sounds to play to me.

Now, again, I may simply be over-worried. That is, perhaps with the abilities you come up with to adjust things, and the ability to cause changes in the interrim through normal play, it will still be surprising. Or, perhaps, your goal is not to have the outcome be surprising, but a well put together story - I freely admit that Universalis creates stories that you would rarely want to relate to somebody, they're only interesting to create on the spot. So I'm sure that there are ways to use a system to create a better output in terms of story after the fact.

Perhaps there's some happy medium, or a way to have your cake and eat it too. So I'd keep hammering away at this were I you. You might come up with something spectacular from it. I'm really just saying that there is something that some players like that is potentially lost here if you don't protect against it's loss. For what that's worth.

Mike

[contracycle]

I'm not seeing a great deal of distinction here between the proposed future story elements and the non-linear sequence of time discussed oin Sorcerer & Sword.  As argued there, I don't think the narration in the Conan movies that makes it clear that the story we are about to see is retrospective really does undermine the ejoyment of the plot.

I also think a point raised by Timfire upthread may be pertinent:

OK, so I have this cool idea for a future event. You're trying to find a way to make sure this happens. But in the meanwhile between now and when this cool event is suppose to happen, something might come along that makes my idea irrelevent or inappropiate.

That is indeed possible, but if we are mindful of the future mandated event, then the future event becomes an in-game restriction which must be worked around; it sort of becomes a rule.  For example, the Conan on the throne might not be the real Conan, but someone else who has stolen Conans identity as king.  Keeping the Conan-as-King motif in play does not necessarily rule out an almost infinite number of ways in which that specific event might be brought about in actual play.  But what it can do is keep play themetically focussed, I would think.

Credit to Callan foor pointing out this aspect of established future events.

[pasoliati]

It's the surprise of where the story goes that's the most entertaining part, and the thing that really surprised me about Universalis. To the extent that the future of the story is known, the surprise is taken away, and the less entertaining it sounds to play to me.

Half-baked thought, but how would this work with a Two-Goal Structure theory http://www.dsiegel.com/film/two_goal.html?

In a single-goal plot, the protagonist has one problem to solve from the point of commitment to the end of the film. Accomplishing a single goal will solve the overall problem. The African Queen, Raider's of the Lost Ark, The River Wild, and Star Trek: Generations, are well known single-goal films (most are not well known, since they don't tend to stay in theaters very long).

...

In contrast, most films we see these days have a two-goal plot. This involves the protagonist striving for the false goal, then learning something that changes the whole situation and going for the real goal to save the day in the end. The reversal of the protagonist's goal takes the entire story in a legitimate new direction half-way through the film.

It seems that proposed future story elements encourage a single-goal; the player knows what he or she wants to happen and will try to support that with proposed future story elements.  To create a reversal or a twist, the GM would have to either discard some of the players' proposed future story elements or do some serious bricolage with the plot.

One of White Wolf's best works in my opinion is Orpheus.  In all of the six Orpheus books, but especially the first they give the gaming group a lot of plot/adventure seeds in the form of mission briefings.  The idea being that the Storyteller (GM) only needs to give the character's the mission briefing and the first act of the adventure is all taken care of.  The problem with the mission briefings as they wrote them, however, is that each of them telegraph a reversal, and since the genre is reversal driven (ghost stories), that means that the mission briefings make the Storyteller's job harder, since he or she now needs to support the original goal, the reversal, and then come up with another reversal of their own.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Grrrr.... Writing formulas. (Well, "formulae," but, c'mon). I read the link, plus this Siegel guy's "Nine-Act Structure" on another part of his website. Interesting, but rigid - a lot of mistaking details for principles and specific arrangements of trees for the nature of forest: "Look, this forest has three evergreens in a row too! That must be telling us something!" "Uh, yeah, we're in Canada. You'd have known that already if you bothered to look at the damn map."

Sorry, pet peeve there. Rant off.

Siegel reduces the "two-goal" thing to "surprise" -- Mike Holmes is emphasizing surprise too, of course -- and you know what? Surprise can't be all, or nobody would watch any movie or read any book more than once..

Now, some "two-goal" -- or three-goal, or four-goal, or whatever -- stories, the ones that really engage me at least, are the ones where there are two (or more) competing values on the table the whole time, but the protagonists may not realize those values are in competition until the crisis comes and they have to make a choice:

"The robbery went off fine, but now I discover what I stole is badly needed medicine -- what matters more, getting the money I need or keeping the morals that make me who I am?"
"I could kill my evil father, but I might become as evil as he is."
"Dark magic gave me cool powers, but if I keep using them, I endanger all my friends."
And so on and so on. (All these are examples from specific things I've seen and enjoyed).

What's important here isn't the surprise; in fact, often the audience is clearly told that Value B is going to be at risk even as the character blindly pursues Value A -- in other words, surprise is sacrificed in favor of anticipation, and knowing what's going to happen heightens tension rather than reducing it.

So it's a totally workable storytelling technique to have all the future goals/events/whatever right out on the table. Even the mechanics of this part aren't so difficult: A character presumably has certain goals/recurring conflicts that come with being who they are and which predictably come up all the time (e.g. Exemplar Conflicts in Capes), plus people can create specific goals/conflicts/events that pertain to the specific story, and then each player has only so many resources to make things happen -- you've got to choose.

So the surprise thing is the simple part, frankly. How to mechanically reinforce the build-up to a desired climax, that's tricky.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not seeing a great deal of distinction here between the proposed future story elements and the non-linear sequence of time discussed oin Sorcerer & Sword.  As argued there, I don't think the narration in the Conan movies that makes it clear that the story we are about to see is retrospective really does undermine the ejoyment of the plot.

Not the same things. All plots can be seen as potentially retrospective. It's a matter of knowing the plot and how it comes out. Yes, in Sorcerer & Sword we may know that the character must survive. Truthfully, even that bugs me a little. But there's still an infinite number of things that can end in up being the plot that leads to the conculsion of this particular arc. If you say, "In the end, Conan ends up as the ruler of Aquilonia in this story" that still detracts from this story in a way that knowing that he will eventually be King of Aquilonia does not. Because we don't know if this is that story or not.

Heck, some stories will tell you up front how they end. Even that's not impossibly damaging. "This is the tale of how Conan became king of Aquilonia" still allows for an unknown plot, and we ask the question "Well how did he become king of Aquilonia?" meaning what interesting plot happened along the way. If some player states that at some point Conan decides to kill the king alienating his daughter, that choice will have no suspense when it comes up.

Now, I don't think that Tony is supposing that all decisions are made up front, and the proposed mechanic ideas indicate that this stuff can be changed before it happens. So that might ameliorate the problem. But even if I know at the beginning of a scene how the end is going to happen...I'd rather not know. Because it's only suspensful to the extent that it might come out otherwise. Again, if, in fact, the player can make a change right on the spot, well that might work. But there comes a big question of how much currency the player gets to make such changes. Too much and the previous decisions really don't matter at all, and you might as well not make them. Too little, and things might get too fixed. Find the right level, however, and then you might be able to get the best of both worlds.

Mike

[TonyLB]

I personally don't want to create anything out in the future of the story because even if I know that it might change before we get to it, while it hasn't changed, the intervening play has to be about getting to what's been established already. That is, it's not creative work, it's just filling in the gaps.

For quick emotional context:  I'm finding myself utterly boggled by something that reads, at first glance, like a blanket dismissal of a whole story-telling style as mere scutwork ("just filling in the gaps").  I'm totally ready to hear that I'm mistaken about this, because I generally figure that Mike is a reasonable guy, and therefore that I must be misinterpreting what he's said.

So, the style of play you're describing, where certain pivotal events (usually the climax) are fixed immutably in the future includes the following games:  The Mountain Witch, My Life with Master, Polaris, Ganakagok and (arguably) Breaking the Ice.  I think those known future points contribute valuable constraint that make the game more creative and interesting.  Mike, do you disagree?

[Josh Roby]

I personally don't think I've ever played in any RPG where the basic ending ("The PCs win") isn't known up front.  Sure, some people play with PC failure and death as real possibilities, and perhaps for them the suspense of succeeding or failing is where it's at, but... that sure isn't the only way to play.

Tony:
a) What compels the players to make events happen?  You can build up the dice on a future event ad infinitum, but if the other players consistently avoid it, never take it up, never approach it, what good are those dice that are sitting on the future event?
b) Logistically speaking, how many events can really be 'active' out there on the table, accruing and losing dice, before the players start losing track of what is out there?
c) Why do you need a GM in this schema?  I see no GM tasks that have not been distributed (or might as well be) to the players.
d) Currency is going to be very important to this system, obviously.  You could either go open (a never-ending supply of currency, you can always earn more) or closed (any currency you earn has to come from somewhere else), which will have some profound impacts on how things play out.
e) How competitive and how cooperative do you want this thing to be?

I of course have my own answers to these questions, but I'm not designing the damn thing.  Looking forward to hearing your take on it.

As far as your 'simple idea with no visible pitfalls' thing, I've got a book and a card game in progress that both started off of 'simple ideas'.  If your thing is at all like they were, I would advise you from the start to cleave to that simplicity of basic design, because once you set the thing in motion, the interactions of the 'simple ideas' will quickly become frighteningly complex.  This is, really, a good thing -- if the complexity of a game arises from the interaction of simple ideas, that makes your game engaging and easy to learn at the same time (Poker, Settlers of Catan, heck -- Football).  If you complicate your simple ideas, though, you'll quickly run smack into problems as the slightly more complex ideas throw of wildly complex interactions, full of potential exploits (DnD, GURPS, any collectible RPG out there on the shelves).

[Mike Holmes]

For quick emotional context:  I'm finding myself utterly boggled by something that reads, at first glance, like a blanket dismissal of a whole story-telling style as mere scutwork ("just filling in the gaps").  I'm totally ready to hear that I'm mistaken about this, because I generally figure that Mike is a reasonable guy, and therefore that I must be misinterpreting what he's said.

Your misinterpretation, if there is one, is in interpreting this as me saying that nobody would find this interesting. There may well be some people who would. As I keep trying to point out, this is my personal preference. Yes, if I know that we're at point A, and that in the next scene we need to end at point B, and the stuff we're doing in between is directed to get us from A to B, then it seems to me like dread dull work to get from A to B. Dread dull. I mean, I can improvise within that context, and perhaps add more to the story in the intervening space. But if I'm allowed to do that, then, as Tim says, I'll just do that. I have no interest in creating events that are beyond just what happens next.

Maybe somebody else would, but it's just not me. As I've said repeatedly, you should probably ignore this statement of preference for two reasons. First, there may be lots of people who want to do what you're talking about designing, I could be weird, and you certainly seem to find it attractive. So you should probably just stick to your vision. Second, I haven't played said game, and we really don't yet know how it works. So it may be that my fears about the game are completely unfounded, and that I (or anyone who shares my predilections) won't find any of it to actually be dull in play.

Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but nobody said anything about the potential problem in Chalk Outlines, and that died a bloody death because of it. Just consider what I've given you as food for thought.

So, the style of play you're describing, where certain pivotal events (usually the climax) are fixed immutably in the future includes the following games:  The Mountain Witch, My Life with Master, Polaris, Ganakagok and (arguably) Breaking the Ice.  I think those known future points contribute valuable constraint that make the game more creative and interesting.  Mike, do you disagree?

I think that I've more than allowed for that in what I've said above. That is, I pointed out how knowing the end of the story isn't a bad thing neccessarily as long as we don't know the plot points in between as we go along. As long as moment to moment play answers a question like "How do we get to the end?" Note that in MLWM, for each character's story, you don't actually know the precise ending. In fact, you're playing to see which of the five endings the character gets, and the specifics of those endings. And where the character will end up moment to moment is always at the player's choice. If, in fact, you had to choose from one of the five endings for your character, and had to engineer getting there on the way, I'd find MLWM to be far less fun than it currently is.

Constraint is good, yes. But it seems to me that requiring players to hit story points along the way is, well, like self-railroading. The plot is pre-determined, so we have to hit the stops along the way. Now, yes, I do get to create those stops in this sort of play, so there is some creative input to be sure (as opposed to having to hit somebody else's pre-determined plot points). But it seems to constrain the interim play such that it's no so that the creativity involved in getting from point to point becomes less about spontenaity, and what's interesting, and more about what makes sense. Basically it's like you're using narrativism to set up the plot, but then having to play simulationism to get through it. I'd rather just do narrativism all the way.

Again, all just how it seems to me.

Mike

[contracycle]

Hmm, well I would see it as borrowing the structure of story, but thren implementing it for Sim.

I genuinely think your objections can be worked around Mike - we just need to find the right kind of plot points, the right kind of structure.

And, lets forget "story".  Lets put plot back to being plot and not story.  Story needs characters, emotions - plot just needs structure.

So if we proposed something like this: "Today you are an Tattooine, next week you will be on Hoth", and this is the mandated structure rather than anything related to story, would that still run afoul of the same problems for you?

[timfire]

OK, so there IS some precedent for this kind of thing. Cool.

I have to say, I think there might be some confusion in this thread. Or rather, I think everyone is interpreting this idea according to their own thinking. I think if you want some critical analysis of this idea, you need to answer two questions: How frequently will this sort of thing happen, and how specific will the future event be detailed?

Playing under the constraint of one or two incredibly vague future events is going to be much different from having every major event be forecasted and mapped out ahead of time. Now, before I continue, let me say upfront that I think this idea at a stage where you, Tony, need to try it out. A couple hours of actual play blows several threads of hypothesizing out of the water.

OK, now a few responses. I'm not sure that Fates in tMW is exactly the same thing as you describing. (I'll stick to my strength---talking about my own game.) The thing is that these "events" don't get defined ahead of time. They get defined in the moment. For example, I have the "Past Allegiance" Fate. Someone I know is going to suddenly appear. But what does that mean? Who is going to appear? Is this someone I like or dislike? What type of relationship did I have with this person? How are they going to appear? See, Fates in tMW are so loosely defined as to do almost meaningless without player interpretation. Players play without any sort of notion of who, when, where, how their Fate is going to manifest, until the time when inspiration hits. And then, boom! The Fate is put in motion at that moment. IME, when players decide on their Fate, they'll start more or less immediately foreshadowing it, which puts it in play. Also, even if they have an idea of how they want to reveal it, they'll still stay open to the possibility of modifying it to fit the ongoing situation.

Now the ending of tMW... that might be what you're talking about.

Lastly, I'll say that my thinking is very much like Mike's. It may just be a play style issue, but let me share a recent experience of mine. A while ago my group played PTA. We were playing a "behind the scenes" wrestling show. The finale of the show was a showdown with another wrestling federation. We all (the players) knew for a while that this was how the show had to end. It seemed very fitting to the genre.

But that finale was the hardest play session to get through. We had all these expectations about the types of things that had to happened that episode. We were really looking forward to it. Normally, we just played whatever came to mind. But with that episode, we had all these events that had to get shoehorned into the episode. We stilll enjoyed the session, but in the end, it just felt contrived, compared with our other sessions.

(Reflecting on this post. tMW seems like playing with "a couple vague future events", while our PTA sessions seems like playing with "a bunch of specific, detailed events."

[Mike Holmes]

I have to say, I think there might be some confusion in this thread. Or rather, I think everyone is interpreting this idea according to their own thinking. I think if you want some critical analysis of this idea, you need to answer two questions: How frequently will this sort of thing happen, and how specific will the future event be detailed?

Yeah, at this point I'm thinking that given Tony's design acumen, he probably has something in mind that is far cooler than what I'm imagining. So Tim, you and I need to let the thread get back to it's original "how to do it" sort of discussion. Once there's something written down, I think we can get back to any specific objections that might still exist.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

I'm going to throw in a few "how to do it" ideas.

The questions are, why would someone invest in an event at all, and why would they invest in an event removed so far in the future?

At first I was thinking that when an event was met, the points invested would be divided among all the players equally. Then I was thinking that when the event was met, the points would return to the player. Both of these had problems. However, I have an idea that might solve some of the problems.

When a player invests in an event, it's an investment. Each time any event is realized in the game, all as yet unrealized but purchased events gain in value. I'm not sure whether they should all gain one point or whether they should increase according to their current value. Actually, they should probably increase according to their initial investment. Let's digress to that for a moment.

Let's suppose that invested points are in units of ten; thus I can only invest ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or similar values in a desired event. Once I do so, I've got a base investment. Each time any other event is realized, my event increases by one tenth the initial investment, thus one, two, three, four points.

Once my event is realized, I get the points. Thus I have an interest in creating events that are not going to be realized immediately, because they're the ones that build up a lot of points and pay me back. At the same time, I also have an interest in creating short-term events. Even if I create an event that happens next, and so accrues no interest, because I have a long term event for which I've paid forty points each short-term event realized increases the value of that investment.

But the other players also need an incentive to realize my event. Let's say that when my event is realized, I get my points plus the accrued interest, but there's a second pot of accrued interest which is divided evenly among all the other players. Thus if I spent forty points on a long-term event and twenty events have been realized since I created this one, I get back one hundred twenty points--my original forty plus twenty events times four points interest is eighty more--when my event is realized; however, the other players also divide eighty points between them.

What of reversals? I would suggest that an event can only be cancelled if the player who wishes to cancel it pays out to all the other players the amount they would have gotten had that event been realized at the moment he cancels it. Thus for someone else to cancel my event they would have to pay two hundred points minus whatever fraction of eighty would have been their share (more easily accomplished by paying the two hundred and getting a share back, with the caveat that it would be permissible for the total points the player had to go negative not more than the amount he would get in his share). Interestingly, for me to cancel my own event would only cost eighty, because I don't have to pay off myself.

This means the more has been invested in an event the less likely it is to be overturned. However, if I've got two major events and I manage to realize both of them in short order, that could easily give me the points I need to overturn someone else's major event, even if it left me strapped for points and at the mercy of whatever they wished to create instead. (There would have to be a rule that an overturned event cannot be reinstated by the original investor, or something like that.)

So I've got incentive to create both long-term and short-term events, and to realize the short term events quickly but delay realization of the long term events significantly, and yet also ultimately to attempt to realize my own long-term events before others do, both because this empowers me to cancel other long-term events and because it prevents them from using the realization of their long-term events to cancel mine.

I'm sure there are some flaws, and it probably requires significant tweaking, but hopefully it will get some ideas going.

--M. J. Young

[Sydney Freedberg]

Interest, and royalties, would be very neat to incorporate; the trick is keeping the math manageable.

Other thought: You could also use this mechanic to define elements of setting over time. Say, I could start by putting down a card labeled "the hundred soldiers of sorrow" without any clue of what it actually is (Heroquest character generation recommends doing just this) and we could all slowly invest over time, presumably narrating our investments as hints ominous or otherwise, until finally the trigger condition is reached and whoever's invested the most and gained controlled gets to narrate what this darn thing is, anyway.