Metaplot and Story Creation

[jburneko]

The planets must be aligned funky or something.  Today seems to be an idea day for me.  Anyway, down in the Immersion & Co-Authoring thread Ron reasserted his claim that published metaplot was antithetical to Simultionist-to-Narrativist Drift.

I agree that this is true if you are talking about pre-published scenarios, in which there are world shattering events that MUST happen in game to keep the metaplot on track.  Oh, and I use the term IN GAME to mean during actual play as opposed to some kind of discourse out side of play or while reading a sourcebook.

BUT I'm not entirely convinced that having a metaplot truly is antithetical to story creation IN GENERAL.  My thoughts go something like this.  

Note: I will use 7th Sea as an example since it is the only metaplot that I know very well.  Those of you who play 7th Sea and wish to remain ignorant of some metaplot points probably shouldn't read this.

In the 7th Sea universe of Theah the Queen of Avalon has a daughter that was taken from her at birth and has been raised by this mysterious Sea Hag figure.  I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly but the details are not imporant.  Okay, this seems to me to be something RIPE for metaplot development.  I fully expect some sourcebook down the line to have some kind of major world turning event involve this relationship.  I don't know what it is because the element hasn't actually be used yet, only set up.

Now IF I use this relationship directly in somekind of relationship map/backstory manner AND if I wish to have coauthoring as Ron defines it, then I must allow for this relationship to develop in a manner befitting player decisions and I can not force decisions or outcomes.  Okay, so now I run a huge risk of having that looming future metaplot point running COMPLETELY counter to anything that my have developed in my game.  At this point I have two options.  I can either FORCE my players via railroading, all roads lead to rome or whatever hand waving goes on into taking actions that comply with the predetermined published outcome OR I can let the players non-railroaded protagonistic outcome stand and ignore the published metaplot.

HOWEVER, this is only if I'm stupid enough to involve the Queen-Daughter conflict DIRECTLY.  I'm just ASKING to be wacked on the head by the metaplot.  But this doesn't mean I have to ignore the metaplot.  To me the purpose of the metaplot is EXACTLY the opposite of what so many people seem to perceive it as.  The common preception seems to be that the best players can hope for is to be color added to the metaplot.  Where I see that the metaplot as color to be added to the player's personal stories.

Consider this.  Say I invent a wholely new NPC who simply KNOWS about the Queen's Daughter.  And I invent a Minor Noble house who also knows about this but their family is sworn to to guard this secret with their lives and the aformentioned NPC is blackmailing this family.  Now let's say I use this conflict as an element in backstory.  Now, the metaplot point merely acts as a McGuffin.  I have incorporated a major "world secret" WITHOUT jeapordizing any future metaplot developments because the core conflicts don't go anywhere near the ACTUAL Queen-Daughter relationship.  The players can let the NPC go on blackmailing the nobles.  The player can kill the NPC.  The players can kill the nobles.  Hell, the players could print up flyers about the Queen's Daughter and post it all over town.  Who says the townfolk have to believe them?

The point is all of this PERSONAL player authoring can go AROUND the metaplot without interfering with the metaplot directly.  Let me use another more concrete example.

World War II is a metaplot.  Think about it. There is a real course of events that happened.  Now if you want to involve the players in huge course-of-the-war altering events then yeah, you're going to have to throw out history and allow the players to change things if you want to promote coauthoring.  However, if you're focusing on a personal story that takes place in a village on the coast of France and spans the time period just before, the day of, and just after D-Day then that doesn't mean your players are being stipped of their ability to coauthor just because a major battle of the war will occur and quite likely impact their story regardless of their actions.

Does this make sense?

Jesse

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Yes, but WWII has already happened. We know the outcome.

If I'm playing 7th Sea and my character kills Duke Whatshisface and then next month a book comes out explaining that Duke Whatshisface is actually an immortal alien (or whatever), then it (the metaplot) does interfere.

That's the problem I have. The plot being spooled out as a marketing tool for the GM to channel to the players. LAME.

[Ron Edwards]

Jesse,

You are making perfect sense, because you have just eliminated metaplot in favor of setting.

The story is no longer the 7th Sea series of events, or WWII, or the Shadows vs. the Whatstheirname in Babylon 5, or the political and military maneuverings of the Lunar Empire in Glorantha. All of those are now simply setting.

And settings are a big, important part of stories. Specifically, a story OF THESE PEOPLE in this particular place and time.

The more elaborate and interesting the setting in both time and space, the more it may contribute to the Premise. Star Wars is fuck-all about the fall of the Empire. It's totally about Luke Skywalker and his father. The setting provides a glorious visual backdrop for this story.

What made the 7th Sea material metaplot is that it was DEFINED as the story, and characters' actions were to BE THERE to witness THE STORY (and comment upon it, etc). Not only was there no changing it, there was no escaping our centralized attention on those NPCs' actions either.

If, on the other hand, that material is setting (as you describe) for the story about some folks IN the setting, then we are ensconced in Narrativism, subclass Setting-based Premise.

Best,
Ron

P.S. Jared is correct too - one of the most important aspects of Glorantha as a setting is that the outcome of the Hero Wars is not a secret to role-players.

[ This Message was edited by: Ron Edwards on 2001-11-09 14:57 ]

[jburneko]

You are making perfect sense, because you have just eliminated metaplot in favor of setting.

Whoa, are you SERIOUS?  Because this is all I've ever viewed a metaplot as.  *MY* definition of a metaplot is: an entertaining on going evolution of the setting, providing interesting color elements to enhance the personal conflicts of the indvidual players.  Personally, I thought this is what the designers of such games had intended all along.  I have trouble envisioning using it for anything else.  Otherwise, you're not only run the risk of devaulizing any future setting (metaplot) developments, you also religate the players to the status of well-armed couriers for the NPCs.

Jesse  

[Ron Edwards]

Jesse,

Yup, I'm serious. What you are describing is not metaplot, it is setting and what happens in it is simply ... no more than ... PLOT.

"War and Peace" does not have a metaplot. The various events of Russian history are its setting, and what happens in it is its plot.

Metaplot for role-playing is a whole different thing. That is a matter of saying "THIS" (the war of the Camarilla or against the Worm or the appearance of the tribe of Joshua, etc, etc) is the STORY. Buy the story, read the story, and play the story. Be your character in the (THIS) story.

A GM who does the same thing with/to players without relying on sourcebooks is also using metaplot. That's why we talk about "published" metaplot, although functionally it's the same thing.

Check out the differences between (1) such a metaplot (published or not) and (2) generating actual story in a complex setting, which itself includes plenty of preplanned events. There is a huge difference.

I have dozens of role-playing supplements and published adventures on my shelves - easily in the hundreds, actually. The vast majority of them (excluding the fight-through-obstacles ones) are EXACTLY what you describe as the player-characters being "well-armed couriers" for More Important NPCs.

In my Hero Wars game at present, in 1625, the dragon will unearth itself and eat practically every damn Lunar soldier in Dragon Pass (plus sundry anyone else who doesn't scurry fast enough). This scene was written by Greg Stafford in the late 1960s and is canonical Glorantha material. Both I and my players know about it, even though our game is set in 1622.

However, our goal of play is not to make sure that the player-characters get to the site of the event and see it, at that time. Nor is it even necessary for their play to be about facilitating or trying to prevent its occurrence (although it could include some aspects of that). No, our goal of play is the magical, moral, and political impact of our own player-characters in their chosen sphere of influence, and what comes of that. When the dragon rises, it will provide a change in the SETTING for this, ACTUAL story creation.

Best,
Ron

[ This Message was edited by: Ron Edwards on 2001-11-09 15:42 ]

[Zak Arntson]

Okay, so how's this:

What if the world is small, and the Setting is fully laid beforehand.  But the world is SO private that the players really can't help but affect things.

Say my game takes place in an underground community. In the main rulebook, I outline several different key Setting points:

• The underground community will break out onto the surface.
  
• After a few years of exploration, they will be attacked by surface-dwellers
  
• They lose, and retreat, sealing off all contact
  
• A holy prophet comes and grants them divine powers.
  
• They rise up and finally defeat the surface-dwellers.
  

Okay, given this kind of advance-knowledge metaplot, is this Setting in any way?  And if so, how can the players NOT affect it?  What if the players somehow prevent the holy prophet? Or keep the surface from ever being discovered?

Of course, this may just be a severe metaplot, and the game could be broken into parts.  The Settings would be: Underground Intrigue, Exploration of the Above World, Fierce War Lost, Triumph of Heroes.

My inclination would be to pick ONE setting to explore. If that becomes popular, release supplements for the same game, different setting. Make sure that buyers know beforehand which Setting the products belong to.

So if 7th Sea wants to have a crazy metaplot, then they'd better spell it all out up front.  And then the periods of time between major events become rpgs in their own right.

Or what?  I'd hate to think there is no way a designer can reasonably work in some major twists in the gaming world. But I am highly inclined to picture the times between twists as separate games (what with their own Premises).

[Ron Edwards]

Zak,

I don't think you're seeing my point.

Forget all this business of "affecting" things. It's not a matter of affecting things, or of what's set-in-stone vs. what isn't. The distinction is precisely where I laid it out for Jesse.

In metaplot-driven play, a great big story is pre-planned that encompasses a whole setting. The player-characters' entire existence is for the purpose of viewing the story, and offering dialogue about it, or as Jesse puts it, being a courier for the REAL main characters.

In plot-creating play, huge and important setting-events can be involved, and they can be pre-planned to an extreme degree. But the story is not ABOUT those events. It is about the player-characters and their situation, actions, and decisions during those events.

So never mind what they can and cannot affect. In my Hero Wars game, the dragon will awaken in 1625 and eat half or more of the Lunar army in Dragon Pass. That's fixed. But that is not the story being told by the role-playing; it is context and a big change in the setting for the story that we ARE telling/making.

Best,
Ron

[Gordon C. Landis]

On 2001-11-09 23:12, Ron Edwards wrote:
In plot-creating play, huge and important setting-events can be involved, and they can be pre-planned to an extreme degree. But the story is not ABOUT those events. It is about the player-characters and their situation, actions, and decisions during those events.

An example - one of my "best" RP experiences was a Talislanta game occurring during the Submen Rising "metaplot" (man, what's a quick summary? - maybe "supposed reincarnation of a prophet-warrior unites the under races in a crusade aginst civilization").  I'm unsure just how much of this storyline the GM preplanned the details of, but (as it turned out - mostly through luck, as it sure wasn't considered and planned) the story we PC's were telling was actually about "What is a Subman?  Are there really 'Subraces'?  Is it really acceptable to enslave them?" etc. etc. - in short, developing a moral sense on this issue personally for the characters (each of whom had some kind of direct, individual 'connection' with some aspect of this issue), and seeing the cultural effects of attempting to expand this moral sense to others in the face of what was becoming a war for survival.

We moved in and out of directly metaplot-related activities, and they mostly served to illuminate the story of the PCs rather than really being "about" what impact we had on the metaplot.

Now, I've GREATLY "cleaned up" the PC's story here - this wasn't a focused, Narrativist arc, it was more an old-style Sim-Drifting-sometimes-to-Nar "campaign" that might wander for many sessions off the core story and into some odd little bit of Talislantan detail - but none the less, I do see it as an example of "metaplot without railroading".

Note also that this was an "all in one book" metaplot, not something that was slowly revealed (even to the GM) over time.  Somehow, 7th Sea was the first "published in xx volumes" metaplot I ran into, and when I first heard/saw the idea, I thought "cool!"  In practice . . .

[Personal aside: You know, seeing how that actually didn't work/had problems for me in practice is what drove me into participating in RPG discussions on the Internet, finding GO, and then the Forge . . huh.  Interesting.]

I'm still not sure if there's a way for THAT kind of metaplot to work without (or with minimal) railroading, but I guess this post is just to affirm that what others have said about "not the PCs story" metaplot is real.

Gordon

[Ron Edwards]

Gordon,

Your example is exactly on target.

My point is that when the setting-material is used as Gordon describes, it is NOT properly called metaplot, but simply setting, which in this case happens to have a lot of changes going on in the world.

As an aside, nothing about Narrativist play demands that every moment of every session is solely devoted to squinty-eyed scripting. Good stories come in all shapes and sizes and paces ... some meander, some are short (embedded in a sea of a long-term changing setting), some are long (enscapulating that same long-term changing setting). What you describe sounds like powerful Narrativism to me.

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

In some of the WW material -- Vampire and WW -- our groups have had interesting takes on the metaplot/setting issue.  I tend to see setting as a starting point, and all other published material as suggested avenues to explore changes to the setting.  With Vampire, so many of my players knew all the behind the scenes metaplot/true history material that I ended up departing substantially from canon in certain areas in order to add interesting twists into the game, in essence using metaplot as judo.  Metaplot, in my games, is what players understand to be the history and politics, but I make no guarantees that it is the truth.

Tribe 8 is tough to alter if you buy into their supplemental material because their published adventures form a pretty rigidly linear metaplot.  Interesting as it is (I think T8 is well-written, interesting stuff, a great example of original world creation), players have no control over macro events, but are merely witnesses, as Ron pointed out.

White Wolf is more flexible, if only because I don't bother to buy their storyline supplements, but also because so much of what occurs behind the scenes in the World of Darkness is part of the secret world, such that swapping out content and making material responsive to player actions becomes far easier.

To be honest, the biggest metaplot issue I'd run across was in a brief Lord of the Rings (GURPS) game I'd considered running.  There's a lot of room in Middle Earth, but my players all wanted to have some involvement in the War of the Ring.  I didn't want to alter the events from the books, and I couldn't figure out a way to satisfy the players' desires to be important heroes without tramping on that forbidden territory.  That was a long time ago, when I was much less savvy about story creation.  Were I to approach Middle Earth again, I don't think it'd be a problem.

Best,

Blake

[Zak Arntson]

Ron wrote ...
In plot-creating play, huge and important setting-events can be involved, and they can be pre-planned to an extreme degree. But the story is not ABOUT those events. It is about the player-characters and their situation, actions, and decisions during those events.

Exactly. So using my example above, playing in the setting is working _around_ the underground community's events. The players will cope with the discovery, repelling outsiders, etc. etc. The plotted-setting isn't metaplot, it's a changing setting which the players work within.  Calling the setting a metaplot is no more valid than calling "WWI Spies RPG" a metaplotted game because we know the Germans lose.

So never mind what they can and cannot affect. In my Hero Wars game, the dragon will awaken in 1625 ...

The only issue here is the player contract. You'd better have players who won't take their player knowledge and specifically go stop the Dragon or whatever. But then you're running into dysfunctional gaming group problems.

Part of the issue is that we've been raised on pre-packaged adventures, in which the players are usually not supposed to know events beforehand. I think in commercial products, this led to an expansion of the thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if we had a grand adventure that wrapped around all the smaller adventures!"

The only problem here is that, unlike an adventure where everything is presented to the GM ... the GM is clueless because the metaplot is revealed in steps, keeping the gaming group in the dark and unable to work within the "grand adventure."

That's when Setting ceases to become such and enters Metaplot territory. It would be like giving a GM half of an adventure and asking them to run it to the end, and please wait for the second half (oh, and don't do anything to mess it up).

Am I on the right track here?

_________________
Zak
http://mailto:zak@mimir.net">zak@mimir.net
http://zaknet.tripod.com/hmouse">Harlekin-Maus Games

[ This Message was edited by: Zak Arntson on 2001-11-11 12:14 ]

[John Wick]

What made the 7th Sea material metaplot is that it was DEFINED as the story, and characters' actions were to BE THERE to witness THE STORY (and comment upon it, etc). Not only was there no changing it, there was no escaping our centralized attention on those NPCs' actions either.

As the guy who wrote the book, maybe I should chide in.

Theah and Rokugan were never meant to be "meta-plot." As stated in both books, the setting is meant to inspire the GM to create his own stories. The players' needs come first, the "world's needs" come second.

I gave an example once how an AEG employee created a completely different time line for Rokugan, creating an entirely different setting (with similar trappings), killed many prominent NPCs, made non-prominent NPCs prominent, and put the characters in the center of it all.

This is a GOOD THING.
Every book I've written has encouraged this.
And, to be frank, anyone who says differently HAS NOT READ THE BOOKS.

And, as Steve Austin puts it, that's all I got to say about that. :smile:

Honestly, I see "meta-plot" as a tool to be used by the GM, the same way the suggested game mechanics are. They are suggestions for the GM to use.

If recent 7th Sea and L5R books have suggested otherwise, it's because I wasn't the line developer.

Take care,
John

[Ron Edwards]

John,

You're right regarding the basic rulebooks of the AEG games. Few basic game rules include metaplot. It mainly shows up in the course of a line of supplements.

No one, especially after reading and playing Orkworld, could imagine you as being a "puppetmaster" writer for role-playing games. The company plans and line developers for 7th Sea and L5R, that is to say, Not You, are responsible for the metaplot in their publications.

Best,
Ron

[Ian O'Rourke]

I may be missing something, as I never got into 7th Sea, and I've not bought a Vampire supplement in a while, but does meta-plot as in bad meta-plot actually exist?

I think this is Jesse's point, is bad meta-plot just GM's putting the events of an ongoing world to a terrible use. After all, the only difference I can see between the 'good' 7th Sea Jesse describes and the 'bad' 7th Sea other people have described is what people have done with it.

As a result, what are these bad meta-plot supplements? And does this link in with the style of play a group prefers - is say a simulationist more likely to incorporate bad metaplot while a narrativist uses it as colour/premise whatever we are calling it these days?

_________________
Ian O'Rourke
http://www.fandomlife.net">www.fandomlife.net
The e-zine of SciFi media and Fandom Culture.

[ This Message was edited by: Ian O'Rourke on 2001-11-11 18:34 ]

[contracycle]

Yeah, I must say I see it as "dynamic setting" more than anything else.  I've never been tempted to use a metaplot as THE plot my PC's will experience, but I think its a great thing to lend a sense of time and place to an existing world.

The only real function of the "metaplot", IMO, is so that the GM can plant scenes that are tangential to whatever the PC's are doing, and yet when examined in retrospect provide an understanding of how the world changed.  

I'm positively drawn to such designs, because that dynamism of setting feeds my Sim/Exploratory monkey.  Now that I've got a handle on L5R's "metaplot" (no mean feat, let me tell you) I intend to exploit it ruthlessly.  I see it as a major way to escape "PC solipsism" in which PC's tend to avoid becoming committed to broad in game events and movements.  If things are happening - the movers are moving and the shakers are shaking - then, like real life, PC's will discuss these developments amongst themselves and with NPC's, speculate on what will happen next, what should happen next, whether what happened was a good thing or a bad thing.

As physics has discovered, space and time are inextricably linked.  I think that "metaplots" just give us setting-over-time, rather than presenting a static snapshot.  AndI've never really even contemplated making my PC's significant decision-makers in such games ever since a nasty experience with Dragonlance.