There is something I really think all Narrativists should check out. It's an interesting theory of story called Dramatica, freely available at www.dramatica.com . Using my own words will only make things worse so here's a quote of the central idea behind the theory:

The one unique concept that sets Dramatica apart from all other theories is the concept that every complete story is a model of the mind's problem solving process. To fully explore any issue, an author has to examine all possible solutions to that issue and make an argument to prove to an audience that the author's way is best.

If you leave out a part of that argument or diverge from the point, your story will have plot holes or inconsistencies. Once you have covered every angle in your argument, you've mapped all the ways an audience might look at that problem and, therefore, all the ways anyone might look at that problem. In short, you have created a map of the mind's problem solving process.

Characters, Plot, and Theme are the thoughts of this Story Mind made tangible. An audience can see them and learn. When a story fully develops this model of the mind, we call it a Grand Argument Story because it addresses the problem from all sides.

After going through the theory once (a 340 page manual!), I believe it has a lot to offer to the Narrativist community, in both theory and practice. I'm still learning it so the best I could give right now is just this gut feeling. I hope that some of you will read it (or at least take a look at it) so we could start a discussion about gaming applications.

As a bonus, the creators of this theory provided a nice map of the story structure as it appears in their manual. It is simply swarming with material for creating Premises and with great ease, I might add.

It could turn out bogus in the end. I'm not a professional writer and my education in this field is minimal so my apologies in advance if I wasted your time.

With respect,

Joe Llama

I'm just skimming it at lunch, but don't the Action Characteristics and Decision Characteristics and so on have gaming written all over them? ("Okay, Thurgar, make your Consideration roll vs. Rolthan's Hinder...")

Actually it looks pretty potent.

-Vincent

You know, that's the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw it. If these guys aren't gamers then this is one bizzare (and very fortunate) incident.

Joe Llama

Now, I know perfectly well that this is just prejudice talking, but my first reaction upon visiting www.dramatica.com was "If an abominable hack like Hickman uses it, it can't be that good."

{edited bcuz the link didn't work}

Metal Fatigue wrote: Now, I know perfectly well that this is just prejudice talking, but my first reaction upon visiting www.dramatica.com was "If an abominable hack like Hickman uses it, it can't be that good."

Brilliant musicians exist with and without technical training. Brilliant directors exist who pre-script and pre-frame shots, and who don't. Brilliant authors exist who outline carefully and draw circles & arrows, and who scribble frantically and tear it all up every night.

All right, I've read most of the way through the book. (It's been a busy week, or I would have finished it by now.)

I don't think Dramatica is likely to be very helpful for a Narrativist gamer. The theoretical structures are intimately tied to a specific methodology, and the execution of that methodology pretty much requires that you shell out $269 for the computer program. Furthermore, the methodology demands that there be a single author with complete control over the story: one is supposed to create a "Storyform," basically a souped-up outline, which covers the entire story from beginning to end. Lastly, the theory presupposes that a story must have one (and only one) Main Character.

Some of the theoretical concepts might be marginally useful in analyzing an existing game to figure out "what's missing"; aside from that, I do not perceive a great deal of utility for gamers.

On the other hand, I'm tempted to shell out the dough and see whether the program improves my fictional writing. To be brutally honest, Tracy Hickman would be a step up.

Hello,

For what it's worth, I've looked at some of the story-creation/assistance software out there. My opinion is that most of it is worthless to the creative process, but that the formatting and organizational features are quite useful. In my test drive of a friend's program, I decided what I really needed was a database to keep track of characters, setting, and plotlines. The creative models tend to be somewhat formulaic, however.

Best,

Blake

Metal Fatigue wrote: I don't think Dramatica is likely to be very helpful for a Narrativist gamer. The theoretical structures are intimately tied to a specific methodology, and the execution of that methodology pretty much requires that you shell out $269 for the computer program.

Metal Fatigue wrote: ]Furthermore, the methodology demands that there be a single author with complete control over the story: one is supposed to create a "Storyform," basically a souped-up outline, which covers the entire story from beginning to end.

Metal Fatigue wrote: ]Lastly, the theory presupposes that a story must have one (and only one) Main Character.

Metal Fatigue wrote: ]Some of the theoretical concepts might be marginally useful in analyzing an existing game to figure out "what's missing"; aside from that, I do not perceive a great deal of utility for gamers.

joe_llama wrote: How come? The theory is all there in the free PDF's.

joe_llama wrote: The methodology was obviously created for people who want to write stories. What I'm asking is whether it's possible to use the ideas in this book and apply them in both theoretical and practical ways with gaming?

joe_llama wrote: Well, this is somewhat arguable, but stories (see below for story type) do tend to have one main character.

Metal Fatigue wrote:

joe_llama wrote: Well, this is somewhat arguable, but stories (see below for story type) do tend to have one main character.

Huh? We're talking about games here. An N-player Narrativist game has exactly N main characters, no more, no less. There is no room in the Dramatica theory for multiple Main Character Throughlines (and you can't make one of the PCs the Impact Character--it radically deprotagonizes them).

Metal Fatigue wrote: Have you played around with the downloadable demo at all? Check it out, you'll see what I mean.

metal Fatigue wrote:

joe_llama wrote: Well, this is somewhat arguable, but stories (see below for story type) do tend to have one main character.

Huh? We're talking about games here. An N-player Narrativist game has exactly N main characters, no more, no less. There is no room in the Dramatica theory for multiple Main Character Throughlines (and you can't make one of the PCs the Impact Character--it radically deprotagonizes them).

Metal Fatigue:

Well, I d/l the demo and went through it. As far as I can tell, the book includes everything you need to know about Dramatica. As I said before, the software only helps you organize your writing stuff according to the theory. Maybe I'm missing something here. Could you please point out where the software gives you something the book doesn't?

Valamir wrote: Now I haven't read Dramatica, and in truth Joe, if its that sizeable an investment in time I doubt I'll be able to get around to it, so I can't speak directly as to how effective a tool it is. I have my doubts about computer aided creativity, and just from your excerpt there seems to be a large amount of jargon (though I guess the same could be said of the Forge).

joe_llama wrote: Could you please point out where the software gives you something the book doesn't?

Metal Fatigue wrote: Hit Control+E. Play with the Story Engine a bit. Notice how there are lots and lots and lots of Storyform combinations that ought to be acceptable according to the book that it will not let you enter.

Actually I think Narrativist gaming works quite well in a main character / supporting cast fashion. Since the point is to jointly craft an effective story you shouldn't have any worries about "my guy not being as important as your guy".

Whoah...I completely disagree. Metal Fatigue (real name unknown) is right. Each and every player character is a protagonist in a Narrativist game. And by that I mean, each player authors through gameplay a thematic statement on the game's Premise with their character. Sidekicks and other supporting cast character types don't do that.

And as far as the usefulness of Dramatica to Narrativist play is concerned, I'm not yet ready to write it off. In reading only the first 75 pages, I was struck with a notion of how it could be really useful. Let me see if I can describe what I'm thinking.

I've written before how I think players creating the same characters over and over is evidence of unconscious preferences for certain kinds of stories. I also think people in general have an intuitive understanding of how stories work, an understanding that's good enough to recognize when a movie fails to have thematic impact, and perhaps even which scenes were responsible, and maybe what was missing from the movie, but an understanding that perhaps isn't conscious enough for the person to be able to articulate more than, "I didn't like it," or "It was okay, but there should have been a fight with the daughter at the end, and the trial scenes were too long." And that's probably not a good enough conscious understanding for a person to be able to craft compelling story from whole cloth, the way some Narrativist games (like, cough, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil) actually require.

But what if a game scenario reacted to a player character the way a structure of supporting cast characters reacts to a protagonist in a story? Forgive me for using my own game design, but this is what my reading of Dramatica has me thinking. Mike and Vincent have written that Premise emerges from character creation in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Having yet to playtest the game, I can't say whether that's true, but even if it's not, let's presume players created characters around a Premise. Because of the way the Trial and Annotations are created, some NPC's, and character relationships with NPC's would also be on the table. I'm thinking a GM might be able to take those NPC's and map them provisionally onto the Dramatica character types, creating a full set of candidates for the Impact, Antagonist, Contagonist, Reason, Emotion, Sidekick and Skeptic roles for each player character protagonist, informed in this decisionmaking by the conflict exposed in the player character's Trial and Annotations. I can't envision how this would be an exact science. NPC's would need to be invented when there wasn't a suitable candidate among the ones created by the players. Some NPC's in the scenario would presumably fulfill dual roles, Sidekick for one PC and Contagonist for another, for instance. And it would probably be a good idea to have more than one candidate for each of the roles for each protagonist, to give yourself options.

Given that setup the key question seems to be, will a player armed with unconscious preferences for a story, and a protagonist created with that in mind, recognize the roles being played by the NPC's and make use of that understanding in authoring the protagonist? And if so, will player handling of the protagonist within that setup, informed by understanding of the roles being played by NPC's, dramatically facilitate story formation, the way dropping a grain of sand into a supersaturated solution delivers rapid crystal formation? I don't know. But I'm sorely tempted to try when I playtest The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. My only hesitation is that I don't want to risk an absolute collapse of functional Narrativism and end up not getting valuable playtesting insight into my game mechanics.

I think there's some potentially valuable stuff in Dramatica. The contradictory relationships between the roles could be used by the GM to inform scene framing decisions. Would a scene involving a character's Skeptic be a dramatic follow-up to a scene involving the character's Sidekick? Does the book get into this kind of thing after where I left off reading? Is it more compelling to put the Skeptic and the Sidekick into the same scene with the protagonist, or would that make for a muddled scene? I think that if the theory is taken at face value, the GM would need to cycle through framing scenes between the player character and the role characters supporting the character's protagonism, so the theorist's concept of scenes as "story argument" would be satisfied, but if it worked, it could be tres cool.

But even if story creation happens as theorized, it still brings up another question, one related to the fundamental issue in Matt's recent thread about his current D&D game. Will the audience (the other players) be interested? A player character isn't a protagonist if his story isn't delivered to the audience. Ron's relationship-map method works to secure audience engagement by delivering stories about matters of significance to them. The setup I'm talking about here won't necessarily have that at such a visceral-brain level. Imagine a player who creates a soon-to-retire cop character struggling with graft and corruption in his department. Absent a son character following in his father's footsteps or something, there isn't any kinship or sex in that story. So the question is, is the presence of story creation in their peripheral vision enough to secure the interest of the audience? And I don't know the answer to that.

What do you think?

Paul

Paul Czege wrote:

Valamir wrote:
Actually I think Narrativist gaming works quite well in a main character / supporting cast fashion. Since the point is to jointly craft an effective story you shouldn't have any worries about "my guy not being as important as your guy".

Whoah...I completely disagree. Metal Fatigue (real name unknown) is right. Each and every player character is a protagonist in a Narrativist game. And by that I mean, each player authors through gameplay a thematic statement on the game's Premise with their character. Sidekicks and other supporting cast character types don't do that.

Paul Czege wrote: Because of the way the Trial and Annotations are created, some NPC's, and character relationships with NPC's would also be on the table. I'm thinking a GM might be able to take those NPC's and map them provisionally onto the Dramatica character types, creating a full set of candidates for the Impact, Antagonist, Contagonist, Reason, Emotion, Sidekick and Skeptic roles for each player character protagonist, informed in this decisionmaking by the conflict exposed in the player character's Trial and Annotations.

Hey,

...one would have to analyze which Elements are represented by which character(s), and add NPCs to round out the full complement of 64 Elements (as well as persuading players to delete Elements from their PCs where they've doubled up...

I think I'd probably go light on this. I think there's the potential that player and GM intuition about story and the functioning of the various roles (the same intuition the player uses when creating the Trial and Annotations) could work in conjunction with each other and inform the handling of player character and NPC during play such that the characters emerge in interesting and functional ways. I think the Narrativist value of Dramatica is more in the arena of how it might help a GM make coarse-level scene-framing decisions than granular-level scenario construction decisions. The "trust the story instincts" part in relation to character handling is where a game has a chance to be collaborative fun, rather than, I dunno, some kind of elaborate calculus.

Paul

Paul,

I think... probably. I mean I think the idea that players would fall into that groove, as it were, is at least interesting enough to try. I'm very intrigued by this idea, think I'll give dramatica another look. A question: was this your specific intent in WFD? If not, what would you do?

I see this on their site:
http://www.dramatica.com/theory/tip_of_month/tips/tip0701.html
multiple main characters and the writers voice.

includes:
"One thing to keep in mind is that Main Character throughline in a story is different than the "writer's voice," the choice an author makes in determining how she will relate the story to the audience. In other words, you can choose to describe any event from any throughline from any character in that throughline's perspective in the first (I), second (you/we), or third (he/she/they/it) person's voice."

Arguably, the GM in RPG is doing so only inasmuch as they are framing scenes? The players will be seeing through the characters eyes, but in a frame selected by the GM. They also suggest the interlinking of multiple leads could be done by creating multiple documents, one for each character - this would accord with my hunch that each player has their own "story" in that each IS the protagonist or main character from the players perspective. OK, not necessarily if you are able to detach, but for a lot of people anyway. Maybe this would be best explored as creating a story/document for each character? OTOH, the idea of "casting" PC's into "archetypal" roles for a specific story, plus ancillary NPC's, with the GM framing to provide a coherent sotryline/throughline, seams plausible to me too. Perhaps one document for each character and one for the central throughline, casting the PC's and NPC's as one of the character archetypes for this throughline? Then the main character in the shared throughline need not be a PC; but each PC would have a throughline in which they were the main character. I shall investigate further.

Paul Czege wrote: I think the Narrativist value of Dramatica is more in the arena of how it might help a GM make coarse-level scene-framing decisions than granular-level scenario construction decisions. The "trust the story instincts" part in relation to character handling is where a game has a chance to be collaborative fun, rather than, I dunno, some kind of elaborate calculus.

Hey Gareth,

A question: was this your specific intent in WFD? If not, what would you do?

Nah, it wasn't anything I'd considered in designing WFD. If I had run WFD a month after I wrote it, I would have done a relationship-map scenario. A few months after that, after reading Sorcerer & Sword, I might have done a bang-driven scenario.

But I can't say I'm not currently tempted to try WFD on a Dramatica-inspired scenario after Scott finishes his Whispering Vault game. It would be fun to write up guidelines for effective scene framing in the game text based on what I'd learned.

Paul