the order of story elements

[Matt Wilson]

This is half baked, but I thought I'd serve it up for thought.

There's different orders of resolving fortune, like FitM and so on.

What about moving other pieces of the game around, like important story factors? I'll just throw one idea out there: character death. If you know your character can't die (or that your character is definitely going to die) that has an interesting impact on play, and I don't know to what extent that's been exploited in a game yet. Part of the story has been told before you even start playing. What does that do to the game, or better yet, what kinds of things could you do with it?

What about a game where you know at the beginning that you've saved the world from disaster? From then on your job is to describe how it happened. Or a game told out of order, a la pulp fiction, or Memento.

Any games that already do these sorts of things? I think Jared Sorenson explores it a bit with a couple games, and Ron does a bit with the story order in Sorcerer and Sword.

-Matt

[Mike Holmes]

We recently played a game of Universalis, where Josh begged for his character to be killed in the first scene for  some reason, and then had the bright idea of flashing back to a year previous to explain how the whole original scene had gotten set up. The entire game (only a few scenes, actually) ended up being in the past of that first scene. And it became the point of play to make events fit with the future scene in a way that made a little coherent story out of it.

I can hear Ralph coming right now to make me write it up...

Mike

[Valamir]

I can hear Ralph coming right now to make me write it up...

I'm still waiting for all the other ones you were supposed to write up...[/quote]

[Paul Czege]

Hey Matt,

What about a game where you know at the beginning that you've saved the world from disaster? From then on your job is to describe how it happened. Or a game told out of order, a la pulp fiction, or Memento.

Any games that already do these sorts of things?

For some actual play, check out http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=69">Theatrix in Action. For some speculative discussion, check out http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=1950">Non-Chronological Play vs. Sudden Inspiration.

Paul

[Mike Holmes]

I'm still waiting for all the other ones you were supposed to write up...

I'm only aware of one. And Blair bothering me about it has made me stubborn. :-)

But back to the topic, I forgot to mention that the "flashback" mechanism is explicit in Universalis (even costs a Coin to use). That doesn't mean that it'll get used in most game any different from how it's usually used in books or movies, but obviously it can be.

Mike