"Bounded" Roleplaying

[Jonathan Walton]

This is split off from: Towards Mythic Storytelling and Mythic Role-play.

The topic is:
-- restricting player choice as a way of supporting an aesthetic
-- formal, required structural elements that shape the narrative
-- reoccuring symbols, which eventually generate a "symbolic language"
-- pre-play scene/game structuring, creating a more extensive framework than that provided by Universalis-style setup

As a way of getting us started, here're some excerpts from the last thread:

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.

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.

Some use of predestination is probably not only a good element, but also a good tool for achieving some structure. <snip> 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.

This example really worked for me. Honestly, I had never really thought of Continuum in that context, but the game does require players to incorperate certain fated events into their own play, figuring out ways to make things happen, simply because they know they have to.  Brilliant!  Yet another reason to admire that game.  And, because the required behaviors are built into the fabric of the game ("Don't create a paradox!") the restrictions don't feel like a burdon.  Additionally, the bad guys of the game are those people who found the burdon of their fate too heavy and have gone around creating paradoxes.  The whole system of creating and resolving disputes of story structure is built into the setting of the game!  And I never even noticed!

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.

I assume you mean that the entire scene is framed, not just set up in the way that Universalis and other emerging games (MLwM, etc.) provides.  If I can coin a new term, I think this concept of "through-framing" is a really interesting one.  You frame the set up, the outcome, and perhaps a few key points in between ("And, sometime during their argument, Viola should smash George's prized collection of antique clocks!").

How strictly players would choose to follow the framing guidelines and how thoroughly the scene was through-framed would be up to individual groups, of course.  You wouldn't have to be consistent either.  Maybe sometimes the outcome would be best left up in the air.  Maybe you only need to determine a few things in advance, or maybe you want to heavily structure an important scene that will determine the future development of the game.  It would really depend on the situation and play style.

[neelk]

The topic is:
-- restricting player choice as a way of supporting an aesthetic
-- formal, required structural elements that shape the narrative
-- reoccuring symbols, which eventually generate a "symbolic language"
-- pre-play scene/game structuring, creating a more extensive framework than that provided by Universalis-style setup

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.

This is almost exactly what I did in my Aquinan Angels game. AA is a two session rpg, designed around Thomas Aquinas's idea that angels and demons had a different mode of free will than humans did: they got to see the entire future at the instant of their creation, and chose whether they would accept it or fight it -- whether they would remain loyal or fall. (In the Inferno, Dante summed this up, when Virgil compels Charon to ferry the narrator across the Styx, despite his being a living man: "This has been willed where what is willed must be and is not yours to ask what it may mean.")

The game is designed to facilitate getting into that kind of mindset, and to do so the players spend the first session making characters, both angelic and demonic, and then working out the plot of the game, scene by scene. This is just basic dramatic structure: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, false climax, true climax, resolution, denouement. There's no particular magic in this specific structure -- I chose it because it is conventional and well-understood, and I needed something to  structure the foreknowledge-generation phase of play. You could replace it with basically any other plot structure you like with no problems.

In the second session, the players play through the scenes we established in the first half of the game. Each scene has dialogue and action invented on the spot (like in a regular rpg), but the Aquinan-ness of the game is that all of the celestial characters know what will happen in each scene, just like the players do. So to play correctly, the  characters have to portrayed as knowing who is going to do what, when, and where. The interest in actually playing the game arises from the fact that it's interesting for the players to try and find out what true foreknowledge would feel like from the inside. Also, it's really, really cool when a character gets a big, overwhelming advantage, and then has to figure out how to throw it away, because they know that "this has been willed where what is willed must be." (You can get really great dialogue from this: angels get to pontificate about the mysteries of Providence, and demons get to rant about the bitterness of being rebels against omnipotence.)

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey Neel,

It's great to see you on the Forge.  Feels like I've been stealing your ideas forever (In Nomine list, Nobilist), since you have such a great aesthetic sense.

Do you have AA written up anywhere, for people to read?  It sounds like a neat use of through-framing.

Also, I was realizing today that My Life with Master uses much more aggressive scene framing than Universalis, in many ways, since the mechanics themselves can actually call for scenes, rather than the players themselves (Captured/The Horror Revealed/Endgame/Epilogue).  To me, this seems to support the idea that aggressive framing is often an effective Simulationist technique for emulating a certain aesthetic (which MLwM does out the wazoo), though I suppose you could use through framing to make sure the premise was addressed in certain ways, though I can't really think of a game that does this.

[Daniel Solis]

Also, I was realizing today that My Life with Master uses much more aggressive scene framing than Universalis, in many ways, since the mechanics themselves can actually call for scenes, rather than the players themselves (Captured/The Horror Revealed/Endgame/Epilogue).

Unfortunately, I haven't read MLwM just yet, but I'm very curious about this mechanical scene-framing. That might just be the ticket to getting across the mood we're discussing even for those who are unaccustomed or are unfamiliar with mythic motifs, let alone creating and playing in them.

EDIT: Of course, the sticky wicket is defining the structure of myths in general or maybe having different sets of definitions for different styles of myths (creation myths, fables, fairy tales, "tall tales," urban legends, etc.) Once we've come to terms with that bit, we might be able to adapt an MLwM treatment to mythic gameplay.

[ks13]

If I can coin a new term, I think this concept of "through-framing" is a really interesting one.  You frame the set up, the outcome, and perhaps a few key points in between ("And, sometime during their argument, Viola should smash George's prized collection of antique clocks!").

This looks like a great technique. I considered the same setup for standard D&Desque game play that requires the "PCs will form a party" approach, where the initial meeting of the PCs can be very awkward (i.e. the attempt at in-character justification for why a disparate group of individuals would band together). If the game requires that the PC form a functional group, the outcome of the scene has already been determined. And the reason for not skipping over it with OOC justifications is that it removes a great opportunity for interaction. The "through-framing" approach would neatly take care of it.

I can also see it being used in "setup scenes" or in cases where a player wants to make an in-character revelation or a "bounded" interaction (something almost like a monologue, but where other players still get to interact). The idea of playing the entire game in "through-framing" mode sounds intriguing, but could this not lead to player fatigue if scene after scene you are narrating a pre-determined outcome?

-Al

[C. Edwards]

A little game called Cradlethorn,  that I've so far left to turn to mulch, uses a much more loose form of this technique. The draft is confusing and problem ridden but might be worth taking a look at to see the scene framing structure.

-Chris

[neelk]

Hey Neel,

It's great to see you on the Forge.  Feels like I've been stealing your ideas forever (In Nomine list, Nobilist), since you have such a great aesthetic sense.

Do you have AA written up anywhere, for people to read?  It sounds like a neat use of through-framing.

Before you praise my aesthetics, be aware I dress quite badly. :)

Unfortunately, I never wrote up Aquinan Angels -- I ran it as a one-shot maybe five years ago. The "game mechanics" were Over the Edge, with specific angelic and demonic powers taken from In Nomine. I use quotes, because the game mechanics were there mostly as a crutch to help carry the game through the moments when the pace of invention ebbed -- anything important really got determined by foreknowledge as needed. These days, I would probably use octaNe as the base mechanics for a game like this -- it moves "declaratory rights" around the table without actually specifying the outcome of the action, so it should work quite well at sharing the cognitive burden of plotting.

At the time, I thought I was being radically innovative, but in retrospect AA seems like a reinvention of the Commedia del Arte: the general scenario and characters were known to the players at the start, and the specifics were improvised. The only really unusual thing is that the characters knew what would happen, too -- it's a little surprising that  metafiction can be turned to a naturalistic purpose.  But the Continuum example shows that this wasn't a unique insight, either.

Al, the second phase of play didn't lead to any fatigue. First, it was a single session of play -- maybe seven or eight scenes -- so the players didn't have to manage a huge continuity across multiple weeks. Second, having structure to work enables new modes of play: for instance, the players can make very effective use of dramatic irony because they don't have to guess what will happen.

The part of the game where fatigue was a problem was the plotting phase -- that needed more structure in order for us to keep making progress. I would really like to have some series of boxes or checklists that the players could fill in to create the plot, so there's some concrete indication of what's been invented and what goes where. There was a lot of wheel-spinning as ideas got invented but weren't connected to the plot, and that was the prime source of player fatigue in the game.  Ideas not getting used because something better is invented doesn't weary people -- the energy is sucked out of a group when people are inventing cool things that go unused because there's no context to fit them into.

[Daniel Solis]

Ideas not getting used because something better is invented doesn't weary people -- the energy is sucked out of a group when people are inventing cool things that go unused because there's no context to fit them into.

Call me crazy, but this problem sounds like it could be solved through a simple technique used in improv comedy. The one version I've experienced is a scene in which there are two actors having a dialogue. The restriction is that they can only say what the audience members' have written on slips of paper and dropped randomly into a hat. Transplanting this into a game story structure, you could have plot elements dropped into a hat by all the players. The plot is determined by whatever elements have been pulled from the hat. Any remaining elements stay in the hat for later game sessions.

Another way to do it might be to break down the plot into distinct sequences. The first sequence is when everyone writes down their idea(s) on papers, and drop them into the hat. Once the opening plot element has been introduced, the next can be pulled to determine the next sequence or, if the players suddenly had a burst of inspiration now that they know how the plot begins, they can add their new ideas to the hat too. Even if you don't have many ideas in the beginning, you still have an opportunity for input later.

Hell, for a gamist slant, you could set a fixed limit on the number of elements a single player can add to the hat. After that point, resource can be earned and spent to add further elements to the hat, thereby increasing your chances of having your ideas influence the flow of the narrative. Hm... Actually, I think I just solved a problem I was having with WTF? Sweet! ::goes off to write::

[neelk]

Call me crazy, but this problem sounds like it could be solved through a simple technique used in improv comedy.

No, that's not crazy, that's dead-on brilliant! The most insightful book on roleplaying I've ever read was Keith Johnstone's Impro, so OF COURSE I should have thought to look in that sphere for ideas. Thanks!

[Jonathan Walton]

Just something else I wanted to bring up, while we're on this topic.  I was reading through when it hit me that "bounded" roleplaying and through-framing doesn't have to only be limited to just the story structure.  For instance, browse through Vincent & Emily's threads that basically describe through-framing the game system while play is going on:

Adventures in Improvized System
More Adventures in Improvized System: Techniques
Further More Adventures in Improvized System
Adventures in Shared Character Vision

This shows that, with a strong social contract to prevent abuse and descent into freeform chaos, you could use a few system boundaries to demarkate what the game system would be like and then improvise the rest during play.  I mean, often times, GMs are responsible for that kind of thing anyway ("So how do we determine falling damage?"), but, when writing for fairly experienced roleplayers, you could build this kind of thing into the game system.  Imagine something that was kinda like "Fudge as you go," where you pick a fairly adaptable toolbox (Fudge, in this example) and just improvise any rules you need.

Or, if you don't like Vincent and Emily's pave the road as you go approach, you could even through-frame the system for each scene, improvizing mechanics before play starts to handle whatever major events will happen in a scene.

[neelk]

This shows that, with a strong social contract to prevent abuse and descent into freeform chaos, you could use a few system boundaries to demarcate what the game system would be like and then improvise the rest during play

A digression: have you actually ever seen this descent-into-chaos happen in practice? I've never -- not even once -- seen this a freeform game degenerate this way in real life, and I wonder to what extent it's a real phenomenon and to what extent claims that it can happen are just a feature of online discussion. I mean, the historical rhetoric of rpgs encourages saying stuff like this (a canonical  descriptions of rpgs is "cops-and-robbers plus rules to prevent 'Bang! You're dead!' 'Am not!'"), but I wonder if it's actually true.

(Also, should this be a separate thread? I'm not clear on the conventions 'round here.)

[M. J. Young]

A digression: have you actually ever seen this descent-into-chaos happen in practice?

I have.

The old Red Dragon Inn at Quantum Link used to do this all the time. People would be socializing, and suddenly a couple of people would decide that it was time for a fight, and they would pull out all the stops, revealing magic abilities, super powers, and other incredible "you can't beat this" lines that completely disrupted the chatting that had been there a moment before.

When I was attempting to run Multiverser demos in AOL chatrooms, we often had people pop in and start trying to interact with the player characters without so much as a by-your-leave, thinking it was freeform and that they could interfere in any way they wished. Some of the things they wanted to do were just completely out of left field.

Of course, those are there because of a lack of social contract--people who don't know anyone wander in and decide to make the game what they want it to be instead of paying attention to what it already is. I don't think it would be the same in a group of friends.

--M. J. Young

[Jonathan Walton]

I've had similar experiences to what both of you are saying.  

I think, if you have a strong social contract, freeform works REALLY well, much better, often, than traditional high-structure roleplaying, especially with people who aren't traditional roleplayers.  Total freeform can be troublesome in spots, unless you have some means of allocating narrative control.  Then again, if you have a strong enough social contract, usually you can decide who's version of events happens in a fairly quick and easy manner.  Near-freeform systems like Once Upon a Time or the Arkana System for Engel, help make this happen even faster.  I've participated in lots of freeform PBeMs that had a strong set of unspoken guidelines of polite social behavior, and they worked beautifully.

However, as with M. J.'s example, social contract only works if you can successful socialize all the people who want to play, getting them to follow along with the "rules of engagement."  It doesn't let you deal easily with people who don't "get it," especially in an anonymous online environment.

So, to answer your question Neel, I don't think freeform is this chaotic pit of doom that many roleplayers claim.  Heck, they say that about diceless play too, and thanks to Amber, Nobilis, and others, that's pretty much been shown to be total crap.  I think what people mean when they say things like that is: "The way I usually play wouldn't work in diceless/freeform; it would just cause things to descend into chaos."

Interesting how we've begun discussing high-narrative control and low-system control in the same thread.  I think they might be related.  If you through-frame most of the scenes and mechanics you need for each encounter, you don't really need as much built-in system to keep things in line.  The narrative restrictions will keep things from becoming insane, so you don't really need "fair and balanced" mechanics to govern the game world.

[clehrich]

Interesting how we've begun discussing high-narrative control and low-system control in the same thread.  I think they might be related.  If you through-frame most of the scenes and mechanics you need for each encounter, you don't really need as much built-in system to keep things in line.  The narrative restrictions will keep things from becoming insane, so you don't really need "fair and balanced" mechanics to govern the game world.

Interesting indeed!  Setting aside issues of whether structure is necessary at one end or another, which would be a topic for a very different thread, the idea that structuring narrative and dropping a lot of systemic control might support more mythic-style play makes a lot of sense to me.

At this link I talked about a soap-opera structure for narrative, and it's something I think serves a mythic structure very well.  The point is that each scene can have a guiding principle, but it doesn't go on so long that anyone feels excessively constrained in general.  So you could have a scene or sequence of scenes (an episode plot) that must meet pre-defined general constraints, but because this does not dominate the entirety of the campaign or even the session it needn't feel constricting.  Further, you could have some mechanism by which players who "own" a particular plot or thread could decide whether they are willing at the moment to accept narrative constraint of a thematic nature.

Chris Lehrich

[Mike Holmes]

I'm a tad fuzzy on this. How aren't all the normal rules of normal RPG play not about constraining the narrative?

It's always been my supposition that the only reason to have mechanics in RPG play is that it improved the narrative in some way. That is, it might not be "mythic" or whatever, but it has some quality when done that makes it better than what tends to be formed by freeform play.

Else we'd all be playing freeform. Or is the contention that we should?

Structure in RPGs is not because we're all immature and incapable of maintaining proper Social Contract. No more so than a canvas is used for painting because otherwise we'd mess up the walls. These things are supports for the activity in constructive ways.

Mike