Towards Mythic Storytelling and Mythic Role-play

[Daniel Solis]

This is a spinoff from the Mysterious Magic thread.

They're powerful, but I'm unsure about the heavy emphasis on emotion.  To me, that's really not a strong identifier of the mythic, the fabulous, or especially of magic realism - the latter in fact seems to be driven by a certain laissez-faire attitude, in fact, the opposite of linking everything to emotion.

Quite right. I was confusing "mythic" with "magical realism." While both treat the fabulous matter-of-factly, I don't know if this leaves much room for players to feel a real connection to the fabulous nature of either genre. Sure, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, no one freaks out about the extra long blood smear moving of its own volition, but we do. Whereas most contemporary fantasy (I'm taking D&D style stuff here) treats as "something fabulous happens because of something you do," I'm keenly interested in changing it to "something fabulous happens because of something you feel." I'll explain why...

"Magic" in a mythic setting isn't so much a seperate dramatic entity, but rather it is the setting itself. The fabulous tends to happen not as a result of willful manipulation by the protagonist, but by more-powerful beings. Even when the fabulous events occur because of protagonistic actions, they're rarely a direct benefit or detriment, but rather used as an tangential explanation for the current state of the world.

"And that's why mosquitos buzz in people's ears." "And that's why the Grand Canyon is so big." "And that's why we sacrifice a goat every full moon." That's pretty much the gist of myth and oral storytelling, I think. A quasi-religious explanation for the natural world and traditional customs. If anyone knows more about the subject than I do, I most certainly defer to the experts.

Personally, I wouldn't have a lot of fun playing a game where everything is in the past tense, so I'd like to add a bit of contemporary game design to the concept of mythic storytelling (or, at least how I see mythic storytelling). I do like the idea that when the fabulous occurs, it is mechanically neutral. However, even if it is neutral, I still think it should have some symbolic relevance to the character. Otherwise, as a player, why do I care?

One method I had suggested in the previous thread, specifically for Gears & Spears, is that characters have a limited repetoire of unambiguous emotions available to them. Further, they can only act in accordance with one emotion. In other words, the characters can only feel one thing at a time and extremely intensely at that. I think connecting the fabulous to emotional responses provides enough distance between cause & effect to distinguish it from the "spell list" magic but not so much that the characters don't care about the fabulous things happening around them.

Do others have a different interpretation of the key characteristics of mythic storytelling and how to make them "playable"?

[Jonathan Walton]

I actually was thinking about this exact same problem recently, for a germinating game concept called "Humble Mythologies."  I wanted everything in the game to act in mythic ways, but also be very humble and normal-seeming.  For instance, the rain might start falling in response to a certain character's emotional state, or another character might be able to always use pay phones without having any change.  Simple, modern magics that wouldn't change the fact that the characters were, more or less, ordinary people.  It would be a game about minor miracles and the lesser beauties and profanities of the world.

So I've been thinking a lot about what makes things mythic.  One of the first things that came to mind is a trick that I've noticed Shreyas using in a lot of the flavor-text of Torchbearer: take one thing and describe it as if it were something else.  The first time I noticed this was in the following passage:

We were late, but we couldn't run to the morning sanctum. We would be heard, and that is not done. Father walked across the lily petals. No one ever heard him. My brother and I had to wade in the waters. The waves followed us up the stairs tamely, as we climbed to the chamber overlooking the river.

Notice how he makes the metaphor real.  He doesn't use a simile or other language to disguise what he wants to say.  He describes the waves as if they were dogs following the boys up the stairs.

Also, look at how directly he says "Father walked across the lily petals."  He doesn't describe it.  He just treats it like the most normal thing in the world.  THAT's mythic.  Taking the extraordinary and making it normal.  Nobilis does this by allowing characters to swallow the sun or move mountains as easily as they would blow their nose.

So, that doesn't tell you how to incorperate that kind of thing into your game, but I'm sure you could come up with mechanics that encouraged those sorts of things.

[Daniel Solis]

Damn, I think you nailed something really nice there. If it's really just a matter of describing things in the form of literal metaphors, then I guess there ought to be mechanics that encourage players to not only describe things in such a way but to actually think in such a way. That's hard. Well, for me anyway, so there probably ought to be plenty of examples to go along with such a brain-tripping system.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Examples do a lot of work for you.  Use them to every advantage.

Neel posted something interesting in the other thread, regarding "establishing a symbolic language"; I thought this was such a blatantly powerful tool that I used explicitly in Torchbearer.  The idea behind it was that, once you were entrenched in your symbolic language, you could say things like, "You encounter a woman in a garden; the butterflies will not go near her", and this conveys, "You encounter a woman in a garden; her beauty is proof against the vagaries of experience and age (depending on what concept you tie the butterfly symbol to)".  The players are encouraged to narrate fabulous things, because the fabulous is inherently more meaningful than the prosaic, but only in very specific, narrow ways.

Hm.  Upon taking a shower and thinking on this more thoroughly, I think what's useful about my system is that the symbolic language is a means, not an end.  Making it a tool rather than an accomplishment takes the pressure off Wushu embellishments; it could work here as well.

[Jonathan Walton]

"The butterflies will not go near her."

Damn fricken' straight, Shreyas.  That's a great example.  Depending on the context of your symbolic language, "Father walks across the lily petals" could do something very similar, telling you a great deal about the character of "father" without having to use many words.  It really is the case that everything is potentially a way of conveying Color in a mythic playing style, and almost needs to be.

What many people miss, I think, is something that Shreyas is hinting at: things need not be incredible effective to be mythic.  This is the mistake of thinking all mythic stuff needs to be like Classical Greek or Wuxia heroics.  In the context of the game, snuffing out the sun might just be something that people do, just like they would walk down the street.  After all, father's ability to walk on lotus petals (as they are floating on the water's surface, presumably) doesn't render him especially effective.  It's just another way of getting to the sanctum.  It just looks damn cool.

As another example, consider the Matrix, which has killer mythic undertones.  If everyone can bend the laws of reality, it doesn't end up meaning much in the game world, just to the audience (who can't bend those laws).  In this way, the second two movies ended up being kind of, well, normal.  Once Neo and Smith were both flying around and doing wonky stuff, it stopped mattering, because it became normal behavior.  They began saving all their budget for effects that were supposed to blow your mind (and often didn't), instead of stuff that just looked really cool (the first movie was basically driven by a strong sense of "coolness").

In many ways, this is why Exalted really doesn't do much for me, in play.  I love the setting and I love the concepts and mythology.  But the Charm system, which provides the bulk of the coolness factor, mostly revolves around doing really flashy and effective stuff (in combat, in achieving your aims, in sneaking around, etc.).  It provides virtually no support for doing mythic stuff just for sheer coolness (having thunder punctuate your threats or flowers blossom in your footsteps), which, to me, is the most exquisite part of the flavor-text.

[Calithena]

This is just a comment based on the gobi/Harlequin interaction on the previous thread. Gobi suggested GG Marquez (not to be confused with Gigi Allen) as an example of what happens depending on feeling, which is a characteristic of the mythic. Then Harlequin disputed that. Superficially I tend to agree, based on my memories of LitToC and OHYoS many years ago, that there's something vaguely laissez-faire-y or 'it just happens'-y about the odd occurences in Garcia Marquez' novels.

However, lots of people think that the magical realist's use of these odd happenings does have a kind of mythic resonance, and read them through Borges' essay "Narrative Art and Magic", which explicitly connects feeling and wish-fulfillment and desire shaping reality to the magical in literature (and then dismisses the psychological novel as the harbinger of a 'false' causality into fiction, in a cute but not strictly necessary move). So I wonder: are we missing the emotional underpinnings of the strange happenings in Garcia Marquez, or are the literary critics wrong to see Marquez-style magical realism as a continuation of the kind of fantasizing we got in William Morris or Poe?

I'd suggest that answers to that question get related back to the RPG issues, but I thought it was worth bringing up even though it's semi-tangential. Since Jonathan Walton's post especially seemed to be leaning towards a magical/mythic world wherein the manifestations of that magic, at least, are quite consonant in scope and feel with the kind of thing we get in magic realism.

[greyorm]

Hrm...yes, but the original "Star Wars" is mythological in its scope, and it doesn't use this sort of symbolic language-as-reality (or rather, in the context of a movie, actual mythic actions). So, what's the bridge between these? How is Star Wars mythological? Why do we think it is?

Nonetheless, the above discussion is an incredible movement towards understanding the creation of mythological gameplay.

[M. J. Young]

Raven--there may be a confusion between mythic and mythological; I'm not sure, but I think the answer to your Star Wars question lies there: Star Wars is mythic, but not mythological.

Somehow, this thread has me thinking of Harry Potter books. Although there are a lot of magics in it that are rather typical of such ideas, it is also dotted with little things that are fascinating: a mirror that shows you your desires; an unlighter that snuffs out street lights; a bowl in which you can put your memories when your mind gets boggled. There are a lot of these little things that are interesting.

--M. J. Young

[Shreyas Sampat]

Mythic storytelling depends on multiple elements, including mythic story structure (displayed in Star Wars) and mythological symbolic language (as seem in The Blue Jackal, The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, The Arabian Nights, et al.)

I think we've done a fairly good job discussing symbolic language (though some tool would be nice); how can we accomplish mythological story structure?  How important is it?  (It seems that we keep coming around to the topic of enforcing story structure in roleplaying.)

Heroquest got me wondering about the "variations on stories" pattern, as well... what could we do with that?

[clehrich]

how can we accomplish mythological story structure? How important is it? (It seems that we keep coming around to the topic of enforcing story structure in roleplaying.)

One way is to have, either pre-determined or constructed over the course of a campaign, a number of general story-types or -themes.  By means of some mechanic or other, such as writing these on cards and playing them, you have players opt to impose a structure temporarily or permanently on a story.  So long as this isn't excessively competitive, it essentially amounts to someone "marking" that X story thus far seems more or less like the start of Y story, and that the parallel ought to be respected to some degree.  Especially if the list of types and themes can expand over the course of a campaign, such that troubled-romance-B can be made to parallel the previously-worked-out troubled-romance-A, you have the development of a mythic sense of story in terms of a kind of vague destiny-formation: romances of this kind tend to go a certain way, as demonstrated by the first one we had, and now this one will go more or less that way too.

Chris Lehrich
[writing with excessive hyphens from the grave]

[Daniel Solis]

I think we've done a fairly good job discussing symbolic language (though some tool would be nice)

What exactly do you mean by "tool"?

[Jonathan Walton]

Star Wars is mythic, but not mythological.

Personally, M.J, I always hate it when people make semantic distinctions like that in discussion and don't explain what they mean.  It may make all the sense in the world in your head, but that statement doesn't mean anything to me.  How are you dividing the mere "mythic" from the "mythological" here?  Those words are almost synonymous to me.

One way is to have, either pre-determined or constructed over the course of a campaign, a number of general story-types or -themes. By means of some mechanic or other, such as writing these on cards and playing them, you have players opt to impose a structure temporarily or permanently on a story.

I actually did this recently in a fairy-tale centered freeform supernatural investigators-type game, using Once Upon a Time cards.  It had only limited success, but, over the long term, would have worked beautifully.

Each player got 5 cards at the beginning of each game and could play them at any time to assume narrative control from me (I took a fairly traditional GM role) and narrate their card into the story.  So they would add a "Wolf" or "King" or "Witch" or "People Fall in Love," etc.  The coolest part was, in addition to giving the players more initiative and game-ownership, it also slowly began building a common symbolic language, because once the "Wolf" card had been narrated into the story, it ceased to be just "Wolf" and became "that Wolf we met in the woods one time who helped us rescue Emily's sister from the witch."  So when the card came up again, the players already had all these connotations from earlier interactions with it.

Actually, I imagine that this would be what would happen with the Torches in Torchbearer, where certain themes would gain more and more powerful connotations as the game went on.  Butterflies might start out being a symbol of "Ephemeral Beauty" say, but, through play, they would gain additional meanings, depending on in what context the butterflies consistently appeared.

It seems that we keep coming around to the topic of enforcing story structure in roleplaying.

That must be the Simulationist in all of us, trying to create the feeling of myth in a medium where it's difficult to predict which direction things will go.  There was no real story structure to my Once Upon a Time mod, and the stories were often not as fulfilling as real fairy tales, because nothing would ever wrap up in a nice little tight package, since it was completely improvised and not predetermined.

Then again, recently I've been wondering about the amount of freedom and leeway in all the roleplaying games that I know (with the possible exception, maybe, of the Pokemon Adventure Game, which I've been desparately trying to find a copy of).  In some ways, I think the amount of player choice in setting up and executing an aesthetic experience leads to less controls that could potentially ensure that play would be fun.  Experienced players who know what they like and how to make that happen are not a real danger, but if people are unfamiliar with the style of play you want them to perform, they're likely to botch early attempts at play, and may not be persistent enough to learn a new style of play, ditching your game for something they understand better.  If you want an example of this, just look at "Continuum," which I love, but still don't feel like I could play effectively.

If you're trying to do some kind of mythic simulation, it seems to me that less player choice might actually be a reasonable place to go.  Some players will scream and gnash their teeth, but I don't seen anything that strange about creating a game where players take on predetermined characters that are required to do certain things.  That happens in the theater all the time.  Even in improv, performers often have set characters who they know are going to do x, y, and z, but then improvize the rest.

Say, for example, you decide you're going to tell a story about the God of the Earth and the God of the Sun.  You decide that the climax of the story will be the Sun gorging itself and growing dangerously powerful (turning into a Red Giant, basically, but in mythic terms), leading to the destruction of all life on Earth, and maybe the planet itself.  If the players know for sure that this is going to happen, they can prepare for it.  Maybe the Earth will decide to fall in love with the Sun, to set up a epic heartbreak and betrayal.  Maybe the Sun's player will decide to play the character as oblivious to the dangers of his actions, or as full-knowing.  The fun it then in deciding how to set up and play out certain scenes, instead of deciding what they will be about.  You could even publish lists of plots, not as examples, but for people to actually play.  Less player choice, but not a worse game setup, I think.

Gee that was a long post.

[Harlequin]

That last, Johnathan, brings to mind a link I ran across a while ago - the Amor Fati site describing their Fateplay system, which I'm looking to partially emulate in my own game right now.  Which centers on the idea that, if it's central to the engine (in their game it is the engine), players don't actually object to taking on "necessities" provided they're left with enough general scope outside of those, and in their interpretation/implementation.

However, I also think that we may be headed into a blind alley associating "trying for the mythic feel" with "need to achieve a given story structure."  I think I disagree, overall, with this; that if the elements are appropriate, the mythic quality emerges regardless of structure.  Or if there are structural constraints, they're no more difficult to achieve than other structural constraints - such as Story Now - that we're used to trying for.

Motifs and symbology certainly go a long way toward this feel.  Including structural elements the same way as you include these, such as in the Once Upon a Time mod (where "people fall in love" is as common as "a beggar"), but with no special stress, seems IMO to put the right level of emphasis on them... and a good degree of player discretion.

Some use of predestination is probably not only a good element, but also a good tool for achieving some structure.  I mind me of a Continuum game (which hit exactly the "not fully comfortable with the mindset" note mentioned earlier), where a PC was standing guard in a hotel lobby, keeping watch for the bad guys and, in particular, one woman who'd been described to him but he had never met.  Then her voice, from behind his chair, hisses to him, "I thought we agreed you would stay out of this operation."  In context, it's obvious that she has mistaken him for his future self.  By the peculiar logic of the game, if true, her words entail a form of predestination... because by knowing that he will someday betray his friends, he knows that this cannot be bucked, and has to just start mentally preparing himself for that day.  Wonderful stuff.  (He did a fabulous job of BSing her, too, rather than dispel the mistake.  Had the room in stitches.)

I wanted themes of betrayal, and that game - by having a predestination engine that works - gave them to me in one short sentence, spoken by a woman whose future self they had already killed.

Lacking time travel, one could nonetheless take a serious leaf from that book - or, rather, from the practical experience of running it - for any game wanting to play with fates as a structural tool.  Elements of successful design there I'd pick out: (A) Ultimately, you must fulfill the destined act.  (B) However, you have full discretion on when you do so.  (C) Failing to do so before your death is, nonetheless, a serious problem (in this case inflicting large amounts of "Frag" aka paradox on everybody who both knows that you're dead and that you didn't accomplish X).  (D) Some things become clear to the players before the characters, due to watching cross-table.  I'd play this up more, in a fate-heavy mythic game.

In fact, riffing on point D, one thought (probably too art-house to be playable, but interesting as a talking point):  A story modeled on The Princess Bride, The Neverending Story, and like tales...

Play proceeds in two phases.  

Play in phase B will look pretty normal, with a GM and several players, playing protagonists in the narrative.

Play in phase A, however, is taken to be the "framing device" as used in those stories.  The kid hearing a story from grandpa, or the boy reading a book, or what have you.  The way I'd set this up would be for the GM to play the boy, and the others (collaboratively, or by turns) acting as the "grandpa" who already knows what is to come.  "She does not get eaten by eels at this time."  In this way, the players get to enforce limited amounts of predestination upon themselves, it's not coming from the GM at all.  The GM, as the child, prompts (by asking questions of grandpa!) which elements are of interest, what he's "worried about" and which therefore needs some predestination applied.

We might have a brief Phase A period at the start of each session, or it might be a resource thing (spend a Plot Die to break to the framing device).  Either way would be fine by me.

I suspect that any predestination scheme, done well (see A through D above), would produce some strong mythic quality simply by including that element, never mind its involvement as a tool toward guiding overall story structure.

Si?

- Eric

[Jonathan Walton]

Si?

Totally.  Lots of great stuff there, Eric.  But we should probably take it to another thread, to keep from derailing the myth topic, since our concerns have drifted to something less specific.

EDIT:
The new, related thread is here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9464

[greyorm]

Personally, M.J, I always hate it when people make semantic distinctions like that in discussion and don't explain what they mean.  It may make all the sense in the world in your head, but that statement doesn't mean anything to me.  How are you dividing the mere "mythic" from the "mythological" here?  Those words are almost synonymous to me.

I echo these comments -- I do not see the distinction at all, as the words are utterly synonymous to me. Could you expand upon what concretely seperates these two terms for you?

Note that I won't necessarily agree, but I'm interested in how something could be mythic and not mythological, and vice-versa; particularly what stories fall into the two categories, and how one would run a mythic game as opposed to a mythological game (again, presuming there is a difference)?