Let's examine the most bog-standard story-prep imaginable:  A GM says "Okay, they'll come into town and the Mayor will tell them that his daughter has been captured.  Then they'll go out and fight the werewolves.  When they win, they'll rescue the daughter only to realize that she's been infected.  Do they leave her as she is, kill her, or sacrifice a powerful magical artifact to cure her?  Moral decision!  Yay!  I'm a great GM!"

That story has a beginning, middle and end.  It has its own timeline.  During play that timeline unspools:  events cascade from the future, into the present, and then into the past.

Before play, clearly, that timeline is dealt with as a whole.  Say the GM thinks "Hey, what if the town blacksmith is in league with the werewolves?  He'd act shifty in the beginning, and then the werewolves might be well armed (with weapons of recognizable craftsmanship) in the middle, and there's a big moral confrontation at the end."  He's just changed the story as a whole, throughout all its parts.  The story, as a whole, is evolving over time, as stories should.

So now I've laid the groundwork.  Here's my  thesis:  Stories can and should evolve, as a whole, during the time that they are being played.  The current state of the art for representing and structuring such evolution is pitiably sparse, leaving groups of players almost entirely to their own intuitive techniques (for good or ill).  Even a small contribution in this regard can make a huge difference (as shown by some games that are starting to explore the territory).

Railroading is one treatment of how a story evolves over the time it is being played:  which is to say, it doesn't.  No matter what happens in play, the structure of the story will not be altered by it.

Intuitive continuity is another treatment of how a story evolves over the time it is being played:  the past is fixed, the future is characterized by vague and deliberately unconnected elements, and the present is a mixing bowl in which the future is connected to the past and structured by player choice.  The future doesn't, generally, change in its structure until it is inserted into the present.

From what I understand of TSoY's Keys, they are a player tool for controlling the evolution of the future:  When you take a Key of "I'm gonna murder this sum-bitch!" you are creating a future event (in the unfolding timeline of the story) by which that Key will be resolved.  Probably, that event is (at the moment you create it) the murder itself.  But, of course, the future may go through several futher evolutions in the real-world time of playing up to the point where that future event spools into the story-present.  So, really, the murder is a starting point to the ongoing evolution of the story-future.  You may not end up murdering him at all, after the future events get further mucked with.

So, why not apply this sort of mechanic much more explicitly?  I mean, we all know that when a player says "Don't worry, this infiltration will be a piece of cake," it guarantees that the infiltration will go wrong.  Is there some reason there can't be an explicit mechanic to back that up?

Returning to the example of the werewolf-threatened town, a GM could simply reveal to the players "Here's the starting story: standard beleaguered town.  You'll come in, be entreated by the locals, head out to fight werewolves.  There's fighting.  There's a rescue.  There's betrayal by at least one, possibly many, of the townsfolk.  Somebody's going to get infected with lycanthropy, prompting a moral choice.  That's where we start, let's play."

Then the players (including the GM) can all vie to control the evolution of that story as it plays out.  Here are some examples of what could happen:

• One of the players says "Behind our backs, the mayors face slips into a conniving, greedy look.  I'm adding 2d6 (or whatever) to entangle him with the later betrayal plot."
• "The crazy old woman on the edge of town may know something about the werewolves.  I'm using my success at pumping townsfolk for information to remove 4d6 from the necessity of fighting.  Let's go talk to the old woman."
• "Okay, we've eliminated the fighting from the future.  Right now it's a straight rescue mission.  But, honestly, I'm liking the idea that this is a conflict between peer communities.  I want to add 3d6 to a new event, 'Negotiate with Werewolf leaders.' "
• "Hey!  The negotiations have gone really well!  But we still have an 8d6 'Rescue the mayor's daughter' thing to do.  How do we make sense of that?  Ahhhh ... that firebrand anti-human werewolf who was arguing against us.  Remember when he slipped out at the end?  Let's entangle that 3d6 'Subtle exit' event with the rescue thread ... he snuck out, overpowered the girls guards, and bolted with her toward the sacrificial altar."  "Right, so the chief takes you down to accept prisoner transfer, and there's this scene of mayhem."  (NOTE:  The significance of the past is just as open to change by these rules as the content of the future is, as just shown)
• "Okay, peace is restored.  We all know that the mayor arranged to have her daughter kidnapped in order to try to get rid of the Werewolf village.  Daughter hates father, all is well."  "Hey ... we've still got that infection plotline, to push us to a moral choice."  "Oh!  Right!  What do we do with that?"  "Daughter's pregnant from her werewolf lover."  "Oh DUDE!  That's why the young warrior came along to help us rescue her!  That explains everything!"  "But now we've got a whole 'nother moral question to unravel.  You just know the alpha wolf is never going to let his tribes bloodline be tainted that way."

I really want to make this work (at least for Misery Bubblegum, but also more generally as a tool for any developing game).  I look at it right now, in the flush of realization, and it seems easy.  Not simple, perhaps, but straightforward:  make a system where the story arc evolves and develops based on player choices.  Make sure that the mechanic for evolution doesn't forcibly turn the story into something everyone will hate playing out.  Set the players loose and watch them have fun.

What's scaring me is precisely that I don't see any traps lying in wait.  What's going to go wrong with this?  Seriously, something has to, and I'd rather have some idea of where the difficult bits will be early on.

Heya,

You're talking about who has credibility to add to the story, right?  Don't Universalis, Dogs, PTA, and Sorcerer basically accomplish what you're talking about?  I do think that each of them have made a major contribution to the gaming industry and have changed the way stories in games are created over time- first off by noting the unglyness of railroading and illusionism.

Am I off base here Tony concerning what you are talking about?

Peace,

-Troy

So here's what I'm imagining based on your post.

1. There's a setting already agreed on. Maybe the GM made it, maybe it's built into the game, maybe the group made it by collaboration.

2. GM prep involves a series of events and a pile of dice he can assign to them. (You'll need stakes for each side of the event: e.g. 'battle with werewolves' isn't self-interpreting - do losers get slaughtered, or wounded, or what? Lots of ways to handle this but you'll need to choose one.)

3. Players have characters. Let's say the characters have two resources:

a. Trait resources. Magic dude, bulging biceps, whatever. These dictate what your character does.

b. Story resources. Dice you can contribute to future events.

4. Play goes like this. Players can use their story resource to introduce new events or weaken/remove old ones. When they actually engage with events, their traits are marshalled to battle against the event dice currently in the other pile in the usual RPG fashion.

This seems like a promising basic framework to me at least. Two questions:

Question 1: When does the story end? When people feel like it? When the biggest event is dealt with? When all events are dealt with? How do all these dice piles move towards the final payoff?

Question 2: What drives play at the mechanical level? I'd think that the obvious thing would be to build up some kind of 'hero point' type third resource, distinct from the story resource and the trait resource, that you can use to add to your trait pools.

So sort of like this. The GM comes to the session. In his mind the climax is the fight with the Big Ass Werewolf and he gives this 10d6. A couple ways this could go.

1. The players decide to work towards that very climax and accumulate enough of the Hero Dice (how do they accumulate them? by overcoming the smaller challenges?) that their Trait plus Hero dice add up to 12 or 13 d6, making success in the final conflict plausible.

2. The players decide that they want the daughter of the village hetman to marry the big ass werewolf so they drive the fighting conflict down with their story dice and introduce this new 'convince the daughter to marry the werewolf' conflict.

Or some combination thereof.

Here's another thing. Is there any graininess to the in-scene resolution? Or is it all maneuvering the conflict and rolling the dice at the end like in My Life with Master, noting how that effects your dice for future conflicts? This is a choice to make.

I think you've got a good general schema here but the details of how it's filled in matter in a lot of ways: for influencing the experience of play, for influencing which choices matter (tactical choices in-scene vs. maneuvering from scene to scene vs. deciding which scenes are going to happen). A lot, as in what choices you can make and the tactics for choosing them ARE the game.

But I do like the idea of the GM prep being a list of weighted events, managed by a GM event dice pool and given to all the players up front. That sounds like a really, really powerful potential way to run a game.

Ummm... I think I hear two things going on. At first, it seems like you're just asking, "How do we (the group) decide what happens next?" That's what the question "How does story evolve" seems to boils down to. The answer to that is... well, very broad. There are many ways to distribute credibility.

Then you ask about your mechanic. It sounds like it'll work. Other games have explicit mechanisms for this kind of thing. Uni jumps to mind (want to see something happen? Spend a token!) but there are others. What seems unique to my not-terribly-broad-knowledge-of-games is that players must compete via rolling dice to get events to happen, while many other games have a simple currency for that sort of thing (drama points, Uni's tokens, etc.)

TonyLB wrote:
Returning to the example of the werewolf-threatened town, a GM could simply reveal to the players "Here's the starting story: standard beleaguered town.  You'll come in, be entreated by the locals, head out to fight werewolves.  There's fighting.  There's a rescue.  There's betrayal by at least one, possibly many, of the townsfolk.  Somebody's going to get infected with lycanthropy, prompting a moral choice.  That's where we start, let's play."

Troy_Costisick wrote: Don't Universalis, Dogs, PTA, and Sorcerer basically accomplish what you're talking about?

Sean, you have lots of specific questions that I will return to when I actually design a specific mechanic to do this for Misery Bubblegum.  Right now I'm just batting around the general concept, so I'm just going to field some of your more general issues.  I haven't forgotten the other questions though!  Pondering them!

Sean wrote:
2. GM prep involves a series of events and a pile of dice he can assign to them. (You'll need stakes for each side of the event: e.g. 'battle with werewolves' isn't self-interpreting - do losers get slaughtered, or wounded, or what? Lots of ways to handle this but you'll need to choose one.)

Sean wrote:
3. Players have characters. Let's say the characters have two resources:

a. Trait resources. Magic dude, bulging biceps, whatever. These dictate what your character does.

b. Story resources. Dice you can contribute to future events.

Tony,

If I'm properly understanding your proposal (and there's no guarantee of that), then the real dangers are going to be in pacing issues.  It seems to me that in a taditional continuity sort of game the pacing arises intuitively.  That is, the conflicts build up via some sort of natural story building process (or at least via a process that's so ingrained that we don't notice it).  Once you start thinking about the future events and how they work out you have to start being highly intentional with regards to pacing.  Do we need to be pushing quickly toward the clocktower, or do we need to slow things down?

There's also the ubiquitous "What about people screwing up the parts you thought were really cool and replacing them with drek?" issue, but that's probably workable.

It also seems that inherent in this method of story structuring is a lessening of tension.  Take for example your "Nothing could go wrong" thing.  Within specific genres we know that this means something will go terribly wrong.  Assuming that we're playing in such a genre, we naturally introduce a mechanical certainty of such a thing (or so it goes in your version).  Now, let's say we spend two hours of real-time play building toward our terrible event when someone says "Hey, let's play against type!  Nothing goes wrong after all!" and spends the necessary resources to make it so.  Suddenly you have this unfulfilled expectation, this anticipation of an event that never occurs.

It seems to me that while what you're talking about here is a fascinating set of tools for story creation such that our creation of stories will probably be more interesting/more powerful, at the same time it may (I'm not sure yet) weaken things from the perspective of players as audience.  We are less able to feel the tension of things... maybe.

Wow... that's really disjointed.  Maybe some of it's useful...

Thomas

Hi Tony!

Cool. I think I'm getting what you're saying. I think your questions for me are more exploration of options, which is cool, because I think you're on to a neat general idea here (events in the game as something in conscious play).

One thing you could do is hand over the list of events and freeform the order. Another thing you could do is have the events in fixed time order. If it was the first (which is what I was thinking) then establishing stakes is more important. If the order's fixed (unless the players or GM spend their story resource to change it) then stakes doesn't matter as much - as you say, if the 'someone's inflicted with lycanthropy' conflict follows the 'fight with werewolves' conflict no matter what, again unless someone spends the story resource, establishing stakes is less important. (Though if someone was getting lycanthropy win or lose, what was happening in the werewolf fight? They're still there if you lose and gone if you win? There's still some need to know what the conflict decides, I think.)

The danger of the fixed order of events is that people start to feel powerless, I think. Unless everyone has a whole lot of that story resource going around. But then you run the risk of endless reshuffling. I don't know.

The trait and story resources don't have to be different. The question is, what are you resolving? There's

(a) what scenes you're going to have, and in what order

(b) how you resolve the individual scenes

Having the same resource for both might be cool, actually, depending on what you were trying to do. It could work either way.

The one thing, though, is there needs to be something you're going for in the scenes I think if you're managing the game at this level. Like how in MLwM you're trying to accumulate love, driving play towards the big scene at the end.

That could create some interesting outcome tradeoffs, like 'hmm, built up three hero points in that last encounter, do I want to use them to buy off the 'inflicted with lycanthropy' outcome or save them so I can introduce a 'the baron's daughter falls in love with me' event later?' type deal.

But this is just getting too abstract for me at this point. Thanks for the cool idea! I don't see any absolute problem with it, so maybe you should get crackin' on the system that implements it!

Hi Tony,

I follow what you're saying, and I definately think it's doable. So far in our group we've only had that kind of thing happen in a scene- or session-level scope, but I don't see why it couldn't be expanded to encompass events that are several sessions away.

Sorry I don't have more to add, but your idea made something "click" that's previously just been rolling around in my subconscious. I'll see if I can think of any potential pitfalls.

LordSmerf wrote:
It seems to me that while what you're talking about here is a fascinating set of tools for story creation such that our creation of stories will probably be more interesting/more powerful, at the same time it may (I'm not sure yet) weaken things from the perspective of players as audience.  We are less able to feel the tension of things... maybe.

Hi Tony,

For what it's worth, what you're talking about is something I've been thinking about for a while... which was inspired by some of our chats about Capes and Misery Bubblegum, so I'm certainly not claiming prior creativity.

I think this is mainly about giving player input into story element a 'mechanical' basis, by which I mean players have resources to devote to story elements, which are then 'rolled' in some way as a conflict.

If so, Universalis does come very close to this - player impact on story is mediated in a 'diceless' way, using Token bids. It's at the character-level of conflict that the dice get rolled.

To make sure I'm on the right track - if we played a game of Uni, and the characters weren't made-up people (or aliens, or furries) but were story elements instead, would this be close to what you are trying to achieve?

LordSmerf wrote:
It also seems that inherent in this method of story structuring is a lessening of tension.  Take for example your "Nothing could go wrong" thing.  Within specific genres we know that this means something will go terribly wrong.  Assuming that we're playing in such a genre, we naturally introduce a mechanical certainty of such a thing (or so it goes in your version).  Now, let's say we spend two hours of real-time play building toward our terrible event when someone says "Hey, let's play against type!  Nothing goes wrong after all!" and spends the necessary resources to make it so.  Suddenly you have this unfulfilled expectation, this anticipation of an event that never occurs.

Returning to the example of the werewolf-threatened town, a GM could simply reveal to the players "Here's the starting story: standard beleaguered town.  You'll come in, be entreated by the locals, head out to fight werewolves.  There's fighting.  There's a rescue.  There's betrayal by at least one, possibly many, of the townsfolk.  Somebody's going to get infected with lycanthropy, prompting a moral choice.  That's where we start, let's play."

Then the players (including the GM) can all vie to control the evolution of that story as it plays out.  Here are some examples of what could happen:

I really want to make this work (at least for Misery Bubblegum, but also more generally as a tool for any developing game).  I look at it right now, in the flush of realization, and it seems easy.

pells wrote: I think you can achieve the same goal this way. By preparing, not a fixed set of linear events but a context (I doubt it's the right word, though). And furthermore, you can throw in battles or investigations or moral dilemma, depending on your players needs.
The question finally : Why are you looking for a mechanic to do so ?

Tony,

That's something close to what I want to say, yes.  You have to be able to make stuff outside of expectations happen, but if you have mechanically established that everyone has the exact same expectations, and that without mechanical influence those expectations will come to pass, then where's the surprise?

If you have mechanically defined those expectations, and it's easy to change them, then who's going to invest any effort in expecting them?

You've got to have some way to make expectations long-term, and still have a way to violate them (in a good way).

Thomas

Yep, but there are several ways to do that.  So long as suddenly overturning a big expectation isn't something that can be done just any time, but which can be done in certain circumstances (which people could subtly aim toward), I think the tension can be maintained.  I'll posit one method, though I'm sure people can think of others.

Suppose resolving some big story-arc gives you a huge surge of resources.  You can either spread these out across many things, or roll them straight into one monumental effort, like confounding some other big story-arc.  For the most part the short-term efforts of a PC are insufficient to stop a story-arc that has a lot of momentum, but the resources from completing another story-arc are sufficient.

I'm thinking particularly of the TV series Angel here, which overturns expectations on several big counts, to the betterment of the story.  SPOILERS FOLLOW.

So, for an example, Darla and Drusilla are on a bloody rampage.  Events in that arc are "Angel finds Darla and Drusilla" and "Angel rescues their victims."  Wolfram and Hart are also yanking Angels chain, a lot.  Event there is "Angel gets fed up with the evil lawyers and stoops to their level to get vengeance."

So, naturally, when Angel finds the girls, they're about to chow down on the staff of Wolfram and Hart.  He rolls the resources he gains from finding them into increasing the importance of stooping to their level.  He resolves "Stoop to their level," closing the doors and locking the naughty solicitors in with the vampires.  With the resources he gained from that, he buys off "Angel rescues the victims" entirely.

Now that is in many ways unexpected.  Angel is letting people die.  Just walking away.  Surprising, yet (in its way) inevitable.  The long-established anger with Wolfram and Hart is what makes it acceptable for him to overturn the "Rescues Victims" event, whereas it wouldn't have been cool for somebody to just say "I think Darla and Drusilla get bored with killing, for no particular reason.  If we just leave well enough alone I'm sure there won't be any more trouble."

In some ways, this reminds me of Capes's "Event" mechanic (unsurprising: Tony = author of Capes). When a player puts a card on the table and writes on it "Event: The Love Interest plummets from a High Place" or "Event: the Hero defeats the Villain," everyone (assuming no veto) now knows that Event will happen, but no one is sure quite how they'll get to it or what will come of it, which offers plenty to be uncertain and engaged about: Will the Love Interest be pushed by the bad guy or jump in despair? Will she be caught or splattered? Will the Hero defeat the Villain easily, with difficulty, honorably, by stooping to his level? And, if these two Events are happing at once, does the Hero fail to save the Love Interest even in his victory, or is his victory precisely the thing that dooms her?

You can concoct endless other types of Events, too, which can be terribly abstract -- "Someone feels morally justified about their actions" -- or in service of particular genre conventions -- e.g. for John Woo, "Event: Mexican stand-off in a church" or for Star Trek, "Someone pontificates smugly."

One added dimension Tony seems to be seeking here is that these [Future] Events need to persist as future possibilities over many scenes and many sessions -- and that they can be cancelled out, made not to happen, if need be. But I'm sure there are other crucial differences I'm not seeing in my sleep-deprived state, so I'll just ask: Tony, what specifically are you trying to achieve that you couldn't already achieve with Capes-style Events modified to last indefinitely until someone specifically chose to resolve them?

P.S. I have a vague image of people writing down their desired Events on index cards, putting them on the table, and then arranging them next to already-played Event cards to create an outline of the proposed future course of events (i.e. plot) or to associate different Events (e.g. the way the Love Interest falling and the Hero winning were associated above, or the way "someone is infected with lycanthropy" followed "big werewolf fight" in Tony's example).

P.P.S.: I think what I just described above is Chris "Matrix Games" Engle's "plot track," except one that's customized and improvized by the players rather than pre-set.

P.P.P.S:

MatrixGamer wrote:

LordSmerf wrote:
It seems to me that while what you're talking about here is a fascinating set of tools for story creation such that our creation of stories will probably be more interesting/more powerful, at the same time it may (I'm not sure yet) weaken things from the perspective of players as audience.  We are less able to feel the tension of things... maybe.

Ah, someone saying the same thing I said. There is a possibility that taking the god's eye/scenerio building perspective will ruin the tension of play.

TonyLB wrote:
Let's examine the most bog-standard story-prep imaginable:  A GM says "Okay, they'll come into town and the Mayor will tell them that his daughter has been captured.  Then they'll go out and fight the werewolves.  When they win, they'll rescue the daughter only to realize that she's been infected.  Do they leave her as she is, kill her, or sacrifice a powerful magical artifact to cure her?  Moral decision!  Yay!  I'm a great GM!"

That story has a beginning, middle and end.  It has its own timeline.  During play that timeline unspools:  events cascade from the future, into the present, and then into the past.

Before play, clearly, that timeline is dealt with as a whole.  Say the GM thinks "Hey, what if the town blacksmith is in league with the werewolves?  He'd act shifty in the beginning, and then the werewolves might be well armed (with weapons of recognizable craftsmanship) in the middle, and there's a big moral confrontation at the end."  He's just changed the story as a whole, throughout all its parts.  The story, as a whole, is evolving over time, as stories should.

Tony,
This is completely out in left field, so use or discard to taste, but should the players be playing characters in this game? Shouldn't they be playing story elements instead?

So like, I'm playing "violence will break out" and you're playing "werewolves are misunderstood" or some such?

I know this is vague as all get-out, but I noticed I was explaining your idea to myself describing the story elements as active and the characters as undergoing the evolving story.

SR
--

Rob wrote:
Tony,
This is completely out in left field, so use or discard to taste, but should the players be playing characters in this game? Shouldn't they be playing story elements instead?

So like, I'm playing "violence will break out" and you're playing "werewolves are misunderstood" or some such?

I know this is vague as all get-out, but I noticed I was explaining your idea to myself describing the story elements as active and the characters as undergoing the evolving story.

SR
--

Rob wrote: This is completely out in left field, so use or discard to taste, but should the players be playing characters in this game? Shouldn't they be playing story elements instead?

TonyLB wrote:

Rob wrote: This is completely out in left field, so use or discard to taste, but should the players be playing characters in this game? Shouldn't they be playing story elements instead?

How about both?  I don't think you get into conflict of interest, so long as the rewards for playing a story element are dependent on other players engaging their characters with that element,

Tony, I have an honest theorectical question here---Why should the players ever invest in future events, rather than just focus on present or near-present events?

OK, so I have this cool idea for a future event. You're trying to find a way to make sure this happens. But in the meanwhile between now and when this cool event is suppose to happen, something might come along that makes my idea irrelevent or inappropiate. You acknowledge that this might happen. In your original example, you have the players negate... err, some sort of fight scene in favor of something else. Obviously, something happened that made the players change their minds.

So my question is, given that there's always a possibility that some future event will make me change my mind, why don't I save myself the trouble and just let things happen intuitively---meaning, I only worry about the here and now, and what I'm going to do immediately next?

Bill Cook recently sent me a game called "Story Steps" that I think is trying to do what you're looking for, Tony. Only it's all just "write up the end goals, and then write up the steps to get there, etc." I think it definitely could be done in a more mechanically solid way.

But I agree with Thomas, only more so. Reading Story Steps, I was thinking "this is like Universalis, but worse." Meaning that I agree with you that Universalis doesn't do this sort of thing, but it almost did. When designing the game Ralph came up with a huge set of rules about monitoring story progress across arcs. You can probably still see them on the website (though I can't seem to find the website...). We removed them from the rules, however, because it was just too much stuff. Which turned out for the best, I think.

Basically, I don't want to have any pre-generated idea of what's going to happen. Oh, sure, I'll have ideas about what I'm going to do in play personally. But what I think is a feature of RPGs is that they have the same quality of the future being unknown that books do. That is, you get to create something with similarities to a book, yet you also get it revealed to you as you go along like a book. That's unique, and I don't want to lose it.

Now, people said the same sort of thing about Universalis that if they couldn't keep their association to the character that it wouldn't be fun. So, perhaps I'm just being a fuddy-duddy. Take it for what it's worth. But the power to create "now" on the spot, and not "what's going to happen" seems to be the attractive part to me. Just saying.

Mike

P.S. Crossposted with Tim. But I think he's saying much the same thing.

Mike---yeah, I think we're saying the same thing.

I also wanted to ask something else, Tony---why should the player delay his gratification? Meaning, why should I invest in future events and not just make those events happen right here and now?

For example, the "mayor betrayal" plot, or whatever it was. Why should I invest in having that happen some time down the road, instead of just making it happen right now? Why can't I just throw down a Drama point or whatever and declare,"As we turn around the mayor gives us an evil grin...He's up to something!!!" That way, the fact that he's involved in some sort of betrayal is entered into the SIS immediately.

Like I said, these are honest questions. If you have reasons for this that you think I'm not seeing, I would love to hear them.

If you drop into and out of scenes, then there may be, in a well-designed game, incentive to focus on the now and the later both. Especially if you accumulate a resource in-scene which drives the game from scene to scene in some way (as in My Life with Master). So e.g. beating the werewolves boosts your story pool, so then you can choose whether you want to buy down the 'inflicted with lycanthropy' follow-up or invest in creating a 'romantic interlude with hot wolf chick' follow up.

(That way of looking at it creates an incentive to keep the in-scene resource and the scene-manipulating resource separate, IMO.)

Sydney wrote: Tony, what specifically are you trying to achieve that you couldn't already achieve with Capes-style Events modified to last indefinitely until someone specifically chose to resolve them?

timfire wrote: I also wanted to ask something else, Tony---why should the player delay his gratification? Meaning, why should I invest in future events and not just make those events happen right here and now?

Light bulbs going on, I think.

TonyLB wrote:
That climax could not possibly have the same depth and richness of meaning if it occurred immediately after the first scene

Like Fates in Mountain Witch or an approaching spotlight episode in PTA, yes.

TonyLB wrote:
So, to turn your question around:  the very next scene, the one that's about to happen, that has a certain place in the story.  It may not be a very important place, no matter how hard I try in this moment.  Why should I limit my efforts to effecting that scene, when all of the story, past, present and future are available for me to fiddle with?

I'm not seeing a great deal of distinction here between the proposed future story elements and the non-linear sequence of time discussed oin Sorcerer & Sword.  As argued there, I don't think the narration in the Conan movies that makes it clear that the story we are about to see is retrospective really does undermine the ejoyment of the plot.

I also think a point raised by Timfire upthread may be pertinent:

OK, so I have this cool idea for a future event. You're trying to find a way to make sure this happens. But in the meanwhile between now and when this cool event is suppose to happen, something might come along that makes my idea irrelevent or inappropiate.

Mike wrote:
It's the surprise of where the story goes that's the most entertaining part, and the thing that really surprised me about Universalis. To the extent that the future of the story is known, the surprise is taken away, and the less entertaining it sounds to play to me.

In a single-goal plot, the protagonist has one problem to solve from the point of commitment to the end of the film. Accomplishing a single goal will solve the overall problem. The African Queen, Raider's of the Lost Ark, The River Wild, and Star Trek: Generations, are well known single-goal films (most are not well known, since they don't tend to stay in theaters very long).

...

In contrast, most films we see these days have a two-goal plot. This involves the protagonist striving for the false goal, then learning something that changes the whole situation and going for the real goal to save the day in the end. The reversal of the protagonist's goal takes the entire story in a legitimate new direction half-way through the film.

Grrrr.... Writing formulas. (Well, "formulae," but, c'mon). I read the link, plus this Siegel guy's "Nine-Act Structure" on another part of his website. Interesting, but rigid - a lot of mistaking details for principles and specific arrangements of trees for the nature of forest: "Look, this forest has three evergreens in a row too! That must be telling us something!" "Uh, yeah, we're in Canada. You'd have known that already if you bothered to look at the damn map."

Sorry, pet peeve there. Rant off.

Siegel reduces the "two-goal" thing to "surprise" -- Mike Holmes is emphasizing surprise too, of course -- and you know what? Surprise can't be all, or nobody would watch any movie or read any book more than once..

Now, some "two-goal" -- or three-goal, or four-goal, or whatever -- stories, the ones that really engage me at least, are the ones where there are two (or more) competing values on the table the whole time, but the protagonists may not realize those values are in competition until the crisis comes and they have to make a choice:

"The robbery went off fine, but now I discover what I stole is badly needed medicine -- what matters more, getting the money I need or keeping the morals that make me who I am?"
"I could kill my evil father, but I might become as evil as he is."
"Dark magic gave me cool powers, but if I keep using them, I endanger all my friends."
And so on and so on. (All these are examples from specific things I've seen and enjoyed).

What's important here isn't the surprise; in fact, often the audience is clearly told that Value B is going to be at risk even as the character blindly pursues Value A -- in other words, surprise is sacrificed in favor of anticipation, and knowing what's going to happen heightens tension rather than reducing it.

So it's a totally workable storytelling technique to have all the future goals/events/whatever right out on the table. Even the mechanics of this part aren't so difficult: A character presumably has certain goals/recurring conflicts that come with being who they are and which predictably come up all the time (e.g. Exemplar Conflicts in Capes), plus people can create specific goals/conflicts/events that pertain to the specific story, and then each player has only so many resources to make things happen -- you've got to choose.

So the surprise thing is the simple part, frankly. How to mechanically reinforce the build-up to a desired climax, that's tricky.

contracycle wrote:
I'm not seeing a great deal of distinction here between the proposed future story elements and the non-linear sequence of time discussed oin Sorcerer & Sword.  As argued there, I don't think the narration in the Conan movies that makes it clear that the story we are about to see is retrospective really does undermine the ejoyment of the plot.

Mike wrote: I personally don't want to create anything out in the future of the story because even if I know that it might change before we get to it, while it hasn't changed, the intervening play has to be about getting to what's been established already. That is, it's not creative work, it's just filling in the gaps.

I personally don't think I've ever played in any RPG where the basic ending ("The PCs win") isn't known up front.  Sure, some people play with PC failure and death as real possibilities, and perhaps for them the suspense of succeeding or failing is where it's at, but... that sure isn't the only way to play.

Tony:
a) What compels the players to make events happen?  You can build up the dice on a future event ad infinitum, but if the other players consistently avoid it, never take it up, never approach it, what good are those dice that are sitting on the future event?
b) Logistically speaking, how many events can really be 'active' out there on the table, accruing and losing dice, before the players start losing track of what is out there?
c) Why do you need a GM in this schema?  I see no GM tasks that have not been distributed (or might as well be) to the players.
d) Currency is going to be very important to this system, obviously.  You could either go open (a never-ending supply of currency, you can always earn more) or closed (any currency you earn has to come from somewhere else), which will have some profound impacts on how things play out.
e) How competitive and how cooperative do you want this thing to be?

I of course have my own answers to these questions, but I'm not designing the damn thing.  Looking forward to hearing your take on it.

As far as your 'simple idea with no visible pitfalls' thing, I've got a book and a card game in progress that both started off of 'simple ideas'.  If your thing is at all like they were, I would advise you from the start to cleave to that simplicity of basic design, because once you set the thing in motion, the interactions of the 'simple ideas' will quickly become frighteningly complex.  This is, really, a good thing -- if the complexity of a game arises from the interaction of simple ideas, that makes your game engaging and easy to learn at the same time (Poker, Settlers of Catan, heck -- Football).  If you complicate your simple ideas, though, you'll quickly run smack into problems as the slightly more complex ideas throw of wildly complex interactions, full of potential exploits (DnD, GURPS, any collectible RPG out there on the shelves).

TonyLB wrote:
For quick emotional context:  I'm finding myself utterly boggled by something that reads, at first glance, like a blanket dismissal of a whole story-telling style as mere scutwork ("just filling in the gaps").  I'm totally ready to hear that I'm mistaken about this, because I generally figure that Mike is a reasonable guy, and therefore that I must be misinterpreting what he's said.

So, the style of play you're describing, where certain pivotal events (usually the climax) are fixed immutably in the future includes the following games:  The Mountain Witch, My Life with Master, Polaris, Ganakagok and (arguably) Breaking the Ice.  I think those known future points contribute valuable constraint that make the game more creative and interesting.  Mike, do you disagree?

Hmm, well I would see it as borrowing the structure of story, but thren implementing it for Sim.

I genuinely think your objections can be worked around Mike - we just need to find the right kind of plot points, the right kind of structure.

And, lets forget "story".  Lets put plot back to being plot and not story.  Story needs characters, emotions - plot just needs structure.

So if we proposed something like this: "Today you are an Tattooine, next week you will be on Hoth", and this is the mandated structure rather than anything related to story, would that still run afoul of the same problems for you?

OK, so there IS some precedent for this kind of thing. Cool.

I have to say, I think there might be some confusion in this thread. Or rather, I think everyone is interpreting this idea according to their own thinking. I think if you want some critical analysis of this idea, you need to answer two questions: How frequently will this sort of thing happen, and how specific will the future event be detailed?

Playing under the constraint of one or two incredibly vague future events is going to be much different from having every major event be forecasted and mapped out ahead of time. Now, before I continue, let me say upfront that I think this idea at a stage where you, Tony, need to try it out. A couple hours of actual play blows several threads of hypothesizing out of the water.

OK, now a few responses. I'm not sure that Fates in tMW is exactly the same thing as you describing. (I'll stick to my strength---talking about my own game.) The thing is that these "events" don't get defined ahead of time. They get defined in the moment. For example, I have the "Past Allegiance" Fate. Someone I know is going to suddenly appear. But what does that mean? Who is going to appear? Is this someone I like or dislike? What type of relationship did I have with this person? How are they going to appear? See, Fates in tMW are so loosely defined as to do almost meaningless without player interpretation. Players play without any sort of notion of who, when, where, how their Fate is going to manifest, until the time when inspiration hits. And then, boom! The Fate is put in motion at that moment. IME, when players decide on their Fate, they'll start more or less immediately foreshadowing it, which puts it in play. Also, even if they have an idea of how they want to reveal it, they'll still stay open to the possibility of modifying it to fit the ongoing situation.

Now the ending of tMW... that might be what you're talking about.

Lastly, I'll say that my thinking is very much like Mike's. It may just be a play style issue, but let me share a recent experience of mine. A while ago my group played PTA. We were playing a "behind the scenes" wrestling show. The finale of the show was a showdown with another wrestling federation. We all (the players) knew for a while that this was how the show had to end. It seemed very fitting to the genre.

But that finale was the hardest play session to get through. We had all these expectations about the types of things that had to happened that episode. We were really looking forward to it. Normally, we just played whatever came to mind. But with that episode, we had all these events that had to get shoehorned into the episode. We stilll enjoyed the session, but in the end, it just felt contrived, compared with our other sessions.

(Reflecting on this post. tMW seems like playing with "a couple vague future events", while our PTA sessions seems like playing with "a bunch of specific, detailed events."

timfire wrote:
I have to say, I think there might be some confusion in this thread. Or rather, I think everyone is interpreting this idea according to their own thinking. I think if you want some critical analysis of this idea, you need to answer two questions: How frequently will this sort of thing happen, and how specific will the future event be detailed?

I'm going to throw in a few "how to do it" ideas.

The questions are, why would someone invest in an event at all, and why would they invest in an event removed so far in the future?

At first I was thinking that when an event was met, the points invested would be divided among all the players equally. Then I was thinking that when the event was met, the points would return to the player. Both of these had problems. However, I have an idea that might solve some of the problems.

When a player invests in an event, it's an investment. Each time any event is realized in the game, all as yet unrealized but purchased events gain in value. I'm not sure whether they should all gain one point or whether they should increase according to their current value. Actually, they should probably increase according to their initial investment. Let's digress to that for a moment.

Let's suppose that invested points are in units of ten; thus I can only invest ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or similar values in a desired event. Once I do so, I've got a base investment. Each time any other event is realized, my event increases by one tenth the initial investment, thus one, two, three, four points.

Once my event is realized, I get the points. Thus I have an interest in creating events that are not going to be realized immediately, because they're the ones that build up a lot of points and pay me back. At the same time, I also have an interest in creating short-term events. Even if I create an event that happens next, and so accrues no interest, because I have a long term event for which I've paid forty points each short-term event realized increases the value of that investment.

But the other players also need an incentive to realize my event. Let's say that when my event is realized, I get my points plus the accrued interest, but there's a second pot of accrued interest which is divided evenly among all the other players. Thus if I spent forty points on a long-term event and twenty events have been realized since I created this one, I get back one hundred twenty points--my original forty plus twenty events times four points interest is eighty more--when my event is realized; however, the other players also divide eighty points between them.

What of reversals? I would suggest that an event can only be cancelled if the player who wishes to cancel it pays out to all the other players the amount they would have gotten had that event been realized at the moment he cancels it. Thus for someone else to cancel my event they would have to pay two hundred points minus whatever fraction of eighty would have been their share (more easily accomplished by paying the two hundred and getting a share back, with the caveat that it would be permissible for the total points the player had to go negative not more than the amount he would get in his share). Interestingly, for me to cancel my own event would only cost eighty, because I don't have to pay off myself.

This means the more has been invested in an event the less likely it is to be overturned. However, if I've got two major events and I manage to realize both of them in short order, that could easily give me the points I need to overturn someone else's major event, even if it left me strapped for points and at the mercy of whatever they wished to create instead. (There would have to be a rule that an overturned event cannot be reinstated by the original investor, or something like that.)

So I've got incentive to create both long-term and short-term events, and to realize the short term events quickly but delay realization of the long term events significantly, and yet also ultimately to attempt to realize my own long-term events before others do, both because this empowers me to cancel other long-term events and because it prevents them from using the realization of their long-term events to cancel mine.

I'm sure there are some flaws, and it probably requires significant tweaking, but hopefully it will get some ideas going.

--M. J. Young

Interest, and royalties, would be very neat to incorporate; the trick is keeping the math manageable.

Other thought: You could also use this mechanic to define elements of setting over time. Say, I could start by putting down a card labeled "the hundred soldiers of sorrow" without any clue of what it actually is (Heroquest character generation recommends doing just this) and we could all slowly invest over time, presumably narrating our investments as hints ominous or otherwise, until finally the trigger condition is reached and whoever's invested the most and gained controlled gets to narrate what this darn thing is, anyway.

(Where did Tony go?)

To atone, I suspect -- Yom Kippur began yesterday, to the best of my (Episcopalian) understanding. Excited as we all are about these ideas, it probably would be best to take a breath and wait for him to return.