Microfiction-Style Roleplaying

[Jonathan Walton]

Without that, text is prose, but it's not a story...

If that's the case, then the only distinctive feature about micro-fiction is its length, correct? Or more clearly, that it evokes (in that short length) some kind of "feeling"?

Yeah.  That's exactly what I was trying to say.  How did I misread you?  You just seemed to be opening up another basket of issues, talking about narrative that wasn't story, and I was trying to keep the discussion from veering off onto that topic.

Translating that to role-playing would seem pretty easy, given that story-content's not the priority. It'd be neat to see a framework or rubric to prompt or organize it, though.

You mean besides Storypunk? :)

Well, I was trying to keep this pure theory and less design, but I suppose I could try my hand at an example:

The players collectively recount memories from a fictional childhood that they shared together.  They take turns beginning each recollection with something like:

"Hey... Remember that time we went fishing down in the old pond and Jamie cut his foot open on that rusty tin can?"

Once the situation is set up, the players can all help tell the story, but mainly determine the parts of them story that involve themselves.  If a player wants to describe what happened to another player, the other player can always reject the description and replace it with his/her own.

JAMIE:  "Yeah!  My foot was spurting blood all over the place.  Jeff had to take off his shirt and tie it around the wound!"

JEFF:  "Yeah, but it was Jim's shirt, not mine."

JIM:  "The hell it was!  You tried to use my shirt but I wouldn't let you.  We had to use Jessie's handkerchief because none of us were willing to get our clothes bloody."

JESSIE:  "I had the hardest time telling my mom how my hankie got soaked in Jamie's blood."

Each memory is an isolated incident and they don't have to be recounted in any sort of chornological order.

Of course, that's not quite a roleplaying game yet.  More like a microfic-esque version of Baron Munchausen, but you could imagine how it could develop from there.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

You didn't misunderstand anything, although I thought you had when I started typing. I swear to God that I was swept away from the screen on a domestic mission and submitted the message before it was baked enough. Driving back from said mission, I said, "Dammit, I was wrong, he got it fine," and you know what? Just now the source of said domestic mission interrupted me again!

Whew. Anyway. Thanks for clarifying the issue. It may seem off-topic, but really, unless I knew where you stood on the conflict/no-conflict thing, the whole thread was gibberish to me.

Best,
Ron

[ThreeGee]

Hey Ron,

I should just pass this thread by, but I cannot let such a sweeping generalization go unchallenged. I am okay with agreeing to disagree, but I do want to point out that you are using story to mean something other than the usual literary meaning. I hope we both agree your first example is a narrative. The author presented one or more events to the reader. However, to most people, a narrative is a story. Your second example is a more sophisticated example of a story -- one which might fall under the category of good, according to Egri -- but it is simply at a different point on the continuum. Both present events and leave differing amounts of imagined detail to the reader.

I cannot recommend C. S. Lewis' "An Expiriment in Criticism" enough. In this text, he examines different categories of literature from the perspective of the reader. One reader will create most of the story for himself, and so reads what amount to fairly generic sketches of a story and fills in the details for himself, while another wants only to read exacly those details the author has included within the text, and so he sets aside his own preconceptions and notions while reading. Both persons are enjoying a story, but the one man's good story is the other's trash.

Having said that, I think we should go back to discussing how a micro-session might be done. My feeling is that an interesting approach would be to put characters into an intense conflict, roll dice to determine the direction of the resolution, and roleplay out that resolution. Where a normal session would be a long build-up to the climax and a very short resolution, we would be starting virtually at the climax and going from there, throwing dice right at the climax and at no other time.

For example, a group of desperately poor men have tracked down the thief who has been stealing bread. The thief turns out to be a child. Do the men: a) kill the thief as a warning to others, b) cut off the child's right hand, in accordance with the law, c) capture the child, thus being responsible for feeding the child in jail, d) let the child go, e) something else. The micro-session would revolve around reaching this conclusion and dealing with the immediate consequences.

Later,
Grant