Microfiction-Style Roleplaying

[Jonathan Walton]

Hopefully, most of you are familiar with the relatively recent writing form known as "microfiction."  I don't mean the stuff that's just really brief short stories, but the stuff that's 10-15 sentences long at the most.  Those of you who own anything by R. Sean Borgstrom are probably aware that she loves to include it in all of her game materials.  It's the form for people who excell at crafting small chucks of powerful prose, but aren't as interested in (or capable of writing) longer works.  Now, many good writers (like Rebecca) do write both, so that's just a generalization based on the amout of bad or passable microfiction you can find on the web.

Part of the fun of microfiction is that you don't ever read just one piece at a time.  They're like bite sized crackers.  You grab a handful and chow down.  Sometimes a group is connected by a theme or idea or image.  Sometimes not.  Think of them like "prose haikus" and you've got a fair idea.

Anyway, I started this thread because I'm interested in the possibility of microfiction-style roleplaying.  This has a direct relationship to my current project, Storypunk, which I'm trying to prep for publication this summer, but I'm also interested in broader and more general comments.

Here's some things to think about:

1.  What would constitute a "micro-scenario" worth of roleplaying?  Obviously, it'd have to be a bit longer than the 10-15 sentences, but maybe a few scenes of PC interaction?  More?  Less?

2.  How to decide when one "block" of roleplaying is finished and it's time to move onto another?  Time it?  15-20 min?  Wait for a climax of sorts?  What if it doesn't seem to be coming for a while?

3.  How to turn it into a meaningful and fun experience?  Maybe you could do something Co9C-esque and have players throwing around motifs to be incorperated into the scenes?  Maybe you could make like Storypunk and have the bits resonate on a common Theme?  But would you necessarily have to build a unity between the pieces in order to create a rewarding experience?  What about a system for creating completely unrelated bits of narrative?

4.  What kind of system would be optimal for running these kind of brief, improvizational one-shot tidbits of roleplaying?  Something like Universalis Lite or subjective-style Fudge, where you can brainstorm elements and assign traits to them?  Or maybe a bit heavier system, but one that allows you to put pre-generated components together to make microbits (like Once Upon a Time or Everway's use of Vision cards)?

5.  Any other thoughts?  Would you play a game like this?

EDIT: Some bad typos that obscured the meaning in some places.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Do you have a link to any microfiction sites so we can have a better idea of what you're talking about?

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

The obvious time frame to me, is one thingy.  I've tried the words situation, Situation, conflict and scene in there, and it's not working.  What I mean is that I can definitly feel that there is a certain size, small enough to be comparable to the micro-fiction, in an RPG.  I'll say scene for the moment, but expect me to come back with a better description.  In terms of wall time, I feel about 15-20 minutes is where I'd be comfortable with this sort of thing.

I think the the answear to the second part is that the average RPG does not come with the sort of set up that would support this.  For it to work, I can see it needing specific initiation, which would define the end point.  For this to work well, a sudden, and apparantly unsatisfactory end , would be set up to have meaning.  For example, a scenario where either the situation is resolved, or a bomb blows up.  Another (better?) example is 15 minutes till the plane leaves.  Do you leave with your girlfriend, whose going away cos you just had an argument, or let her go.  The implication being that you either stay together, or never see each other again.  Both of these cases, the set up give an endpoint, that's can't drag out.

For your mention of Universalis, I get the feeling your thinking of a GMless environment?  I think that these would probably require a GM. The GM's job is pacing, and these are all about pacing.

Jumping out of order, it's clear to me that a low search and handlng time are required.  If it's short, you don't want the feeling of rolling dice all the way through it.  In fact, I'd be tending towards the extreme low end, and probably not invole fortune either.  This style would be well suited to serve Narrativist aims.  I think that you could get some very interesting Gamist sessions out of it too.

My first thought was Soap.  My second was Baron Munchausen.

My third was to take a system (in this case, The Pool).  Have each player write a sentance or two about a character.  For example, "A lonely housewife, widowed 5 years ago".  Some traits are assigned to the character.  Then, separatly, they write down some goal or intent, focused towards the character to thier left.  Some traits are assigned, associated with the goal.  Choose a location (Stations and shopping malls are good choices), and then go.  After the first scene, pass the goals to the player on the right.  The traits associated with the goal go with it.

With 4 players then, that's 3 - 4, unique, linked, but separate scenarios played out.

[Jonathan Walton]

The first two issues of the microfiction zine Double Room show a fairly varied and interesting group of pieces:

http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_one/issue1.html
http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_two/issue2.html

For a more roleplaying-oriented source, check out the fictional "quotes" in the margins of the intro chapter of Nobilis:

http://www.silveragesentinels.com/pdfs/Nobilis_Introduction_sample.pdf

Microfiction works are also called Short-Shorts, Prose Poems, Flash Fic, and a host of other names, just to clarify.

[szilard]

Hmmm...

This brought improv to mind for me... where people in the audience throw out some information, maybe a relationship between the characters and a place - and the performers create a short scene based around it. There are usually improv 'games' - which are sets of rules that provide some shape to the scene. Who's Line is it Anyway? is an example of this sort of thing. When to cut scenes off is usually a matter of judgement, but it becomes fairly clear to most when they have gone on too long...


Stuart

[Bob McNamee]

This seems a bit like the Soap sentence format we are using for the Yahoo indie-netgaming e-mail game.
We've apparently mutated it beyond the normal for the game in length of descriptions.
You get cool focused scene snippets.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for the links. Turns out I used to write microfiction back in high school without really knowing it. I will give you my thoughts on the subject and how it relates to making a microfiction RPG told from the perspective of someone who thought he had invented a new form of poetry, although never followed through on it.

When I was doing it, I came up with an idea of what it was, excatly, that I was writing. What I was writing was scenes or parts of scenes that were taken out of non-existent larger works. The term prose poems fits because the piece should convey an emotion they way a poem would. Taken as poetry, they can be satisfying. Taken as narrative, they can be potentially frustrating because there can seem to be more and we want it but it is the artist's intention to halt the story where he did so the audience can participate in the creative process by imagining what happened next, what came before, and so on.

So as an RPG were narrative is created in the shared imaginative space, I don't see how a microfiction game could work. Microfiction is already a shared imaginitive activity IMO with everyone who reads the piece sharing the text in their imaginitive space and then working from there to fill in the blanks, if there are any.

Micro fiction begins where it does and ends where it does because that is where the artist decides it should. With a group, how would this get decided. If part of a piece is meant to leave you wanting more, how can this be handled in a collaborative effort?

I think that microfiction might work as a starting point for an RPG scene as inspiration. The poetic aspect does serve well as inspiration. I'm not so sure about microfiction as play. I wouldn't equate it with playing a single scene, for example. Sure a single scene can be brief, but is it microfiction? These are questions to be asked.

[ScottM]

Nanofictionary is a Looney Lab card game, focusing on the creation of extremely short stories.  I suspect it's not quite what you're aiming for, but the deck could be a good way of creating characters and a scene without a GM.  It is competitive rather than collaborative, though I suspect it could be tweaked to allow for cooperative play.

Here's a link to it: http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/Nanofictionary/Rules.html

I finally played a couple of rounds last night for the first time.  It's fun, and brings Once Upon a Time to mind... with different goals and play.

Scott

[Oh, it's up for an Origins this year too.]

{Edited to eliminate a redundancy)

[talysman]

here's the vague glimmerings of an idea that might be useful.

some of the definitions of microfiction I have seen emphasize that the piece must have a character (or characters,) a conflict, and a resolution; in other words, it's a really tiny narrative piece, but it is still just as much a narrative piece as a novel, play, or film. I specifically recall these rules being in place when I competed in the local alternative paper's "Fiction 59" contest, where you had to write about a character resolving a conflict in 59 words or less.

for a "microrpg" game, one temptation is to translate those three restrictions directly, but some of the comments in this thread seem to suggest we all see problems making that translation...

but we may have something better. an rpg (distinct from literary forms) is Exploration. Ron has mentioned (including here) that Exploration involves imagining:

(a) characters (b) in a setting (c) dealing with a situation (d) via a system of rules (e) all colorfully

so one possible approach to a "microrpg" would be to keep players focused on a metagame level, treating characters as NPCs (a topic raised in the recent SQUEAM thread) ... and simply not stat out characters much at all. if you had stats in such a game, maybe they would be a Character stat, a Setting stat, a Situation stat, and a Color stat, indicating which areas of the microstories that player is most interested in; perhaps a Character stat of 4 means that the player has a total of four character-related tropes... and perhaps it also means that the player rolls 4 dice when attempting to change a trope in an existing character.

something vaguely like that.

[Mike Holmes]

I think that you've just described a Universalis Complication, John.

Mike

[Paganini]

I guess I'm not quite catching the drift of this thread. I've seen micro-fiction I think - like Jane Yolen's 100 word fantasy stories, right? They're cool and all, but what's the draw to do something like that in an RPG?

Basically you're talking about single-scene role-playing, which you sure could do easily with Universalis, but what's the advantage?

[Jonathan Walton]

Basically you're talking about single-scene role-playing, which you sure could do easily with Universalis, but what's the advantage?

What's the advantage that microfic has over longer narrative forms?  There are obviously some advantages (bite-sized, direct, evocative) and disadvantages (no time to do anything complicated, ephemeral, limited), but mainly people like it because it's different.  Then again, you might as well ask what advantage poetry has over prose.  They're just two different ways of doing something.

Same thing goes here.  Why play a roleplaying session composed of unrelated single-scene narratives?  Because it's different.  Who says that roleplaying has to involve a long extended narrative?  What's the advantage in that?  Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages in both types of play.  So why preference one over the other?

[Paganini]

Same thing goes here.  Why play a roleplaying session composed of unrelated single-scene narratives?  Because it's different.  Who says that roleplaying has to involve a long extended narrative?  What's the advantage in that?  Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages in both types of play.  So why preference one over the other?

Um, yeah. That's what I was asking. I assume if you want to do it, there's a reason.

[Jonathan Walton]

So "because it'd be fun," "why not?," and "let's try something different" aren't good enough reasons for you?  

If this type of thing doesn't interest you, that's cool, but it sounds like you're implying that this style of play wouldn't be fulfilling.  I see it as being just as fulfilling as traditional narrative styles.  Why?  That's hard to answer.  Why wouldn't it be?  It's just a different form of roleplaying.  Why am I attracted to it?  Because it sounds interesting and fun.  Do I need another reason?

[Paganini]

So "because it'd be fun," "why not?," and "let's try something different" aren't good enough reasons for you?

Nope. In spite of the way a lot of people use the word, "preference" is neither unreasoned, nor arbitrary. I can give you lots of reasons why I enjoy my style of play that go way beyond "beacuse it's fun." Microfiction doesn't sound like it'd be that fun to me. I want to know why you think it would be. Not an attack, just a simple question.

So far, this thread is dealing with the design of such game, making the assumption that once the game exists someone will want to play it. I'm suggesting that identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the play style beforehand would help the design process produce a more robust game. Maybe you've already thought about this, but so far you haven't articulated it. So, that's what I'm asking. Tell me why I want to play this game, then give me a system that helps me do it. :)