Sim to Nar "drift" in actual play

[Gordon C. Landis]

Ron mentions me in the acknowledgements of the GNS essay as contributing thoughts on "drift" (thanks, Ron).  I'm not sure exactly which posts of mine he found useful, but as a consequence I've been thinking about the issue a fair amount, and . . . well, let me just start describing the actual play and see where that leads.

One subset of the loosely-connected 9 or 10 people I game with nowadays had a long-running "multidimensional" campaign (known affectioniately as "the Blip game"),  long before I met any of 'em.  The GM duties rotated and the characters were all members of an organization dedicated to protecting the "fabric of reality".

There's a couple of players from that game that are only rarely available for play nowadays, but when one  or two of 'em are available there's a GM who'll often whip something together where one or more of these Blip characters can have an "adventure" with characters in whatever other game is running at the moment.  Generally this involves moving all the characters out into some other dimension (anything - a Star Wars world, the Judge Dredd world, a CoC world, Greyhawk, Planescape - anything), usually with appropriate intro scenes for  players from each "world".

Anyway . . .  that long setup is just to explain how Bodan, my 3rd level DD3e elven Rogue, found himself chasing after an attractive, dark-haired supposed damsel-in-distress through a magic circle of stones into another world.  After a fairly brief transition scene in a war-torn nexus plane of some sort (where I learned that the damsel had tricked me, and was probably not a damsel at all), I chased her down a cave opening (actually a manhole, which led (after some spooky lights and funky world-twisting visuals)  to the afore mentioned Judge Dredd universe.

I'd been playing in pretty much Actor/"what would my character do?" mode (with a little "if I'm TOO parnoid about getting into the stone circle, I'll never meet up with the rest of the crew"), and this continued for the first bit of my sojurn in the Dreddiverse (which I know very little about, BTW - never read the comic or saw the movie).

Loud, scary, crowded place - look for a quiet spot.  Trapped in a building, some obvious authority figure types come in looking for something/one - check the exits.  Yup, they've got 'em covered.  Try to sneak out through  the kitchen - OK, good, but they're still on my tail - they keep glancing at some device they're carrying that seems to let 'em track me.  hmm - find a hiding spot, continue past it a few hundred yards, then double back and climb into the hiding spot.  When they reach the spot where I turned around, listen real close with those elven ears of mine . . .

Sprinkle in 5- 10 skill rolls of various sorts - awarteness, stealth, listen - and that covers it.  Somewhere in the middle, though, action shifted to other characters and scenes (including another character I was running - but lets not add that complication . . . ), and I-the-player knew that everyone else (including an attractive, dark-haired female PC) was at the local "police" office trying to track down the very woman Bodan was chasing, who it turns out was a shapeshifter of some sort wreaking havoc with the reality-balance in every world "she" touched.

So while I say "Bodan's listening to what the cops are saying", I add "do any of them mention an attractive, dark-haired woman?"

The GM went with it, and Bodan cleared his throat, stepped out of the shadows and said "Gentelmen, I would be VERY interested in speaking with this woman you mentioned - could I prevail upon you to take me too her?"   He was taken politely into custody,  met up with the rest of the group - including the attractive, dark-haired PC (who he'd actually met in a previous adventure in his world, but NOT known she was "from another dimension"), a nice bit of "you're not who I'm looking for - but hey, don't I know you . . . " ensued, and things wrapped up realtively soon (the shapeshifter was clever and powerful, but apparently no match for the Judges of the Dreddiverse - with our info they coralled "it" fairly easily).

It was a very intriguing moment for me - I'd just about played-out the interest of being "my guy" running from the cops in a reality entirely strange to him.  I'm not sure where the idea to ask about  an "attractive, dark-haired" woman came from, but when it did, it seemed like a PERFECT way to "justify" my-guy deciding to let himself be caught and move on with the rest of the session.  It wasn't so much drift as a leap - out of a mushy, Sim-Nar mix of some sort mode into a pure Narrative decision that only used the need to be "in-character" as a tool to maintain SOD, not as an end in itself.  I suppose not ASKING, but SAYING the cops were discussing such a woman would have been a full jump into Director stance . . . but it wasn't really needed, since the GM clearly was as interested as I in getting us all togther (or at least, moving beyond "cat and mouse" pursuit games) at that point (earlier, our seperate activities were just fine).

OK, that's it on this post - hope it was of interest.

Gordon

[Mike Holmes]

I dunno. That doesn't sound like what I thought Drift meant. I think Ron should take that credit back.  :wink:

What I really mean is that what you describe sounds like a shift in play. If this one action was just the first step to playing the game in a Narrativist manner, then I'd say that you had drifted. But all I see is a single move. To "shift" is to play in a different mode than the one you were playing in previously. So, you were going along all Sim or Gam style and you had a sudden urge to do something Nar. OK, so you did it. Did you then continue to drift in that direction, or did you shift back to Sim play immediately?

In fact I think that might make a practical definition for Drift. Shifting consistently away from the way the game is best designed. And usually it applies to whole groups, though I suppose that a player can drift off all by his lonesome.


I think that people don't understand how much shifting happens. In some games people shift so fast you can't even keep track of how they're playing. And they usually do it unconciously. First I make a decision that's about achieving my Gamist goals, then I make one about Verisimilitude, then I make one that is to drive the plot.

Not all players shift. Some never leave their favorite style. But I'd guess that especially between Gamism and Simulationism shifting is remarkably common.

Drift is less common. Drift often requires effort, and as such is often less pursued. This is why System Does Matter. Because working against the system is like swimming upstream.

Mike

[Gordon C. Landis]

I agree - this experience was about one and only one decision, that I was particuallarly sensitive to because I had been thinking about drift, but it isn't really  . . . evidence? . . . of drift in and of itself.

One interesting facet of "real" drift that your post reminds me about - it can (in my experience) drift back and forth.  I've had a game drift towards Nar focus for a few months, then drift back into Sim for a few months (at least, looking back on it I think that's a fair description).  It may be (at least for my group) that maintaining a Nar focus in the "traditional" long, ongoing RPG campaign is just not feasible - and that may not be a bad thing.

Gordon

[Mike Holmes]

On 2001-12-05 16:31, Gordon C. Landis wrote:
I've had a game drift towards Nar focus for a few months, then drift back into Sim for a few months (at least, looking back on it I think that's a fair description).  It may be (at least for my group) that maintaining a Nar focus in the "traditional" long, ongoing RPG campaign is just not feasible - and that may not be a bad thing.

Now that's fascinating. Why do you think it occurs? Do particular players drive it, or does it just happen as a group dynamic? You say it may not be a bad thing, but have you considered addressing it? I think that the general theory is that drift often occurs because there has been no discussion of group GNS goal. Is this the case here? Or do you think that it is a sort of campaign survival tactic?

Mike

[Gordon C. Landis]

Mike -

Certainly the best example I have in mind (a Talislanta campaign I've mentioned on these forums before, perhaps 5 yrs long, 3 or so of which I was involved in, with 2 or 3 several month breaks along the way) had no group discussion of GNS goals - it reached its' most recent hiatus (almost a year ago now, I think - it may be trully "over") in the middle of my "discovery" of GNS, before I felt able to discuss it with folks in my group.  Partially, I do see it as a campaign survival tactic.

I'll try not to use GNS terms in this next bit, as no one (except me, towards the "end" of the campaign) would have used 'em at the time . . . We had a wide variety of play-style preferences, and by "drifting" about, everyone knew that the part they liked would crop up from time.  The social connections were good (everyone was pretty good friends), there was a strong commitment to play an RPG together, and the drifting became a way to keep everyone coming to the sessions.   "Maybe there was no fight tonight, but there probably will be one next week", "Man, I'm sick of this romance with the dressmaker and everyone getting outfitted up for the big ball - but there's no way the ball can last past this session, so THAT will be over soon", "When are we gonna get back to the Subman/slavery issues?  Wait, it looks like the GM plans to focus on that for a while - cool!".  Kind of a group dynamic, occsionally driven by the GM's sensitivity to the degree of "dissatisfaction" being shown by particular players.

Occassionally, particular players really would "check out" during play segments they weren't interested in - read a book, work on character details, even take a nap.  Usually, this was when their character was not involved in the scene, so it didn't bother me too much.  But I always found it a bit irritating - more than a bit, when the scene really called for their character to participate - and I tried to avoid doing it myself.  But in this play approach, it really is quite easy to get bored for a bit - and then, an hour or so later, be deeply engaged and completely enjoying the experience.

I have begun addressing this (or something quite like it) with various members of my group, implying that a more focused play session (where everyone agrees to be more/mostly G or N or S, among other things) might give greater satisfaction.  Also, my free time is becoming increasingly precious to me, and I just don't want 20% (or more) of my RPG time to be boring.  It's helped - we are more focused of late - but we haven't really gotten in-depth *GNS* focus over the "life" of a 6-8 session run yet.  I blame myself - what I need to do is actually run a game the way I want to, and not just talk about how it theoretically could be.  But I've rarely GM'd with this group - which means I've rarely GM'd in 5+ years.  

It also seems that most Nar-focused play I've seen discussed IS a 6-8 session story arc, and I could easily make the argument that you need that kind of "conclusion" to build a satisfying story.  So "not a bad thing" is mostly a theoretical claim that stretching out Nar-focus too long is self-defeating, and thus if you insist on traditional long-campaign play, it might be best to shift out of Nar for a while.

Hey, I think most of that really fits in "Actual Play"!  Hope it covers your questions . . .

Gordon