Strange thing happened in our final episode of Bountiful.

Jen played Brigit, a faerie (well, y'know, it's in space ... so a space-faerie, I suppose) whose Issue was her exile from her own kind, finding her place and discovering (or not) her self-worth.  Sydney played Weiss, ex-military, whose Issue was originally Honor and then mutated (after a brutal spotlight episode) into Power.  That pretty much tells the tale on Weiss.  I played Mason, a criminal and perennial loser.  He wanted to find people who would hang out and share his loserhood, and whose skills would enable him to stay afloat as a bounty-hunter.  His problem is that he saw the potential that these two were suppressing, and being a decent guy he felt impelled to help them realize it.  His Issue was "Are you doing right by your friends?"  The finale was his Spotlight episode.  I had assured in the previous episode that Weiss and Brigit were both offered deals that would take them away from Mason to something better.

So we did our little formalized (and, I suspect, mildly destructive) pre-play at the beginning of the episode, asking what things people wanted to see in the episode as it evolved.  Jen said, since it was our last episode and we weren't looking to play the characters again, that she wanted a happy ending.  I got a real bad feeling and asked "What exactly do you mean by a happy ending?"  And she explained that she wanted to assure that the characters would be together, as a functioning and happy team.  So my real bad feeling was justified.

Pretty quickly I said "That's deciding my character's Issue by fiat.  I'd rather be free to deal with that through play," and she said (quite reasonably) that she wouldn't enjoy a game that ended on the down note of everyone going their separate ways, and we just hung there, quite unhappy, for a while.  Like, half an hour, back and forth, repeating the same things in slightly different words.  But, for me, that was just time needed to get my emotions in order.  I was pretty sure from the moment the conflict arose that we weren't going to find a compromise:  I wanted the possibility of a miserably unhappy ending, and she couldn't be satisfied with it.  Eventually I just gave in and said "Okay, we'll guarantee a happy ending.  Let's just play."

So the game was actually fun, and we had a happy ending that ... yeah ... it was a little contrived, but fine.  But it was all pretty wierd.

There's the destructive pre-play issue.  I think I understand that.  We should never have been having that discussion in that way.  But would Jen have felt ambushed if I revealed that a happy ending was optional only when the sad ending was a fait accompli?  Hard to say.

The bit I don't quite understand is the absolute insistence that an unhappy ending where people don't succeed could not be a satisfying end to the story.  Mason could have abandoned the other two characters, for their own good.  It struck me as his most likely course.  He knew he was holding them back.  In my mind it would have been really cool to have him deliberately piss them off, them go off to their happier lives with consciences clear, and Mason end up back in the gutter.  It would have been satisfying on many levels.

At the same time, I recognize that it can be harder to find satisfaction in that sort of story.  It's a lot less certain as a formula.  I wonder why that is. 

Why is "Failure, failure, failure, VICTORY!" a classic, easy, satisfying story arc almost every time when "Victory, victory, victory, FAILURE!" isn't?

TonyLB wrote: Why is "Failure, failure, failure, VICTORY!" a classic, easy, satisfying story arc almost every time when "Victory, victory, victory, FAILURE!" isn't?

TonyLB wrote:
Why is "Failure, failure, failure, VICTORY!" a classic, easy, satisfying story arc almost every time when "Victory, victory, victory, FAILURE!" isn't?

Do you think this is why the problem cropped up so forcefully in the last session?  That people who are planning for next week are able to look at the emotional questions that tragedy raises and say "That's good fodder for next week," but people who are at the end of the game don't see the same value?

Hi Tony,

You've never faced having to do something unpleasant in life (though you know it was ultimately good for you), and promised yourself a treat afterwards for getting over the hurdle?

That reminds me, I need to make an appointment for a wisdom tooth removal....urgh...

Hello Tony

Have you played Polaris? Do you have a similar problem with the pre-determined tragic ending there? If yes, ok, you´re consistent. If not, why not?

Cheers,
+ Mikael

TonyLB wrote:
Strange thing happened in our final episode of Bountiful.

Why is "Failure, failure, failure, VICTORY!" a classic, easy, satisfying story arc almost every time when "Victory, victory, victory, FAILURE!" isn't?

Endings make important statements.

It might be useful to separate the success or failure of the overall endevor from the personal judgement on the character(s) involved.  In a classic tragedy, the endevor may succeed or fail, but the judgement leaves the character in a worse personal place than when he started. (Oedipus succeeds at learning who his is, but learns doesn't feel very good about himself afterward.)

So your character might fail to life himself out of the gutter in the end, but be redemed by feeling good about what effect he had on others.  Failure with judgement good.

A pure "happy ending" is of course success with judgement good.  Everything works out.

I think you were going for the failure with positive judgement, and falling into the tradition of the martyr -- giving up something, but havng a positive impact on others.  This actually has potential for good counterpoint against the other character's successes.  (It's a tradition in ficiton, especially fatnasy epics like LOTR that the big resolution involes loss of something as well.)

Anyway, I think you actually had an ending for your character in mind, but the group process headed it off.  And maybe this is what should not have happened.

Mikael wrote:
Have you played Polaris? Do you have a similar problem with the pre-determined tragic ending there? If yes, ok, you´re consistent. If not, why not?

contracycle wrote:
Because the tension and suspense in the action rise toward a climax in the former, and descend toward a denoument in the latter.

contracycle wrote:
But also, looking at these characters, it seems to me their goals were conflicted in this regard.

Alan:  Oh, I do like that distinction between success/failure and judgment.

Alan wrote:
So your character might fail to life himself out of the gutter in the end, but be redemed by feeling good about what effect he had on others.  Failure with judgement good.

TonyLB wrote:
I don't get that.  Why is it a "climax" if the protagonists win, but a "denouement" if they lose?

Okay.  Why does this matter?  The characters are fictional.  We can fulfill their goals or leave them unsatisfied, as we choose, and still be satisfied as players.  Can't we?

I think you deserve some good karma for sacrificing some of your vision for the game to let your friend realize her vision. 

I think it probably has a lot to do with expectations, both in general and the specific expectations each player brought to the game.  What kind of shows were you using as reference points?  It's well known in Hollywood that American audiences are suckers for happy endings.  That why I don't watch many mainstream Hollywood moves -- the tacked-on happy ending kills my enjoyment of what has come before. 

How important was the "team" in your concepts?  I get the feelng that your friend thought the team was pretty important to the story, and the story was about how the team brought these disparate people together and they'll take care of each other from then on.  That's a very strong, life-affirmng theme. 

On the other hand, it sounds like you ultimately wanted the story to be about the separate arcs of three different people, some of whom go on to greater glory and some of whom stumble and fall.  Since your character was the stumblng kind, you wanted to stay true to that conception of him. 

It might not purely be a matter of happy endings versus downbeat endings, it mght also be a very interesting queston of which story is more important, the story of all the characters as a team, or the individual stories of each of us?  You might not realize until the end that each player has answered this question differently. 

Danny_K wrote:
How important was the "team" in your concepts?

TonyLB wrote:
Jen, in fact, talked about how the story had been about how the people didn't work together as a team, but that once Weiss and Brigit had overcome their problems she felt that the conclusion had to be about how the team now did work.

Well, I dunno.  That was just one bit of a discussion.  And since Mason was consistently a good team player, so long as the context of the team was one of utter loserdom, it would have been perfectly reasonable to think that my "thing" for him as a character was for him to bring the losers together and thus transcend their loserdom.  So, if that's the assumption, then once those two are functioning as part of a team Mason's part would be just to oversee their triumph.

But at this point I'm going pretty far out on a limb of conjecture.  I just don't know what she was thinking with any certainty.

The concept that really clicked for me (when explained by smart people) was "reincorporation": what distinguishes a "story" from "a bunch of stuff that, y'know, happened" is that things introduced in the beginning come back again at the end, to be changed or reasserted in some conclusion manner. This is Chekov's infamous gun on the wall in the first act that goes off in the third act. A happy ending that just dumps some major story element isn't satisfying reincorporation (good example pending); a tragic ending that reincorporates all the major story elements can be very satisfying. The key is that, of the important pieces you had at the beginning, all of them are there again at the end, appropriately changed or unchanged: "the same only different."

So in my spotlight episode (me being Weiss's player), even though it was a really unhappy ending, it was tremendously satisfying because it brought elements back and dealt with them solidly -- especially Tony's brilliant idea that the last scene of her spotlight should be her heading into the court-martial that was her first scene in the series. All the patricle-antiparticle pairs met back up and annihilated in pretty flashes of light.

But it would have been very difficult to achieve satisfactory reincorporation with a "Mason goes off alone and unloved" ending to the series (not impossible, mind you, just damned difficult). The problem was that the team was as important a character as any of the three protagonists individually. In fact, it formed at the end of the very first scene of the series (admittedly a long scene, with Weiss's court-martial embedded in it). Coming to an ending that said, "well, everybody goes off in separate directions" would have failed to reincorporate the idea of the team.

Now, we could have done it. The way that comes to my mind: That first scene of the series started with Mason and Brigit together on the team, having been abandoned by their prior partner ("Sparrow," an NPC) and needing a new pilot, and then running into Weiss (fresh from her disgrace); so it might have been a good "same but different" to have the series end with Mason abandoning the team of Weiss and Brigit...who then say "well, we need a new streetwise guy" and go off to find a replacement Mason.

I'm not sure if that would have satisfied Jen; it would have satisfied me. Regardless, we would have had to work harder to get reincorporation this way than with the happy ending we actually did, because we hadn't been laying the groundwork for it as well. Of the four previous episodes, at least two followed a clear structure of

1) the team is tenuous -- either newly formed and not sure of each other yet, or getting on each other's nerves, or whatever
2) the team encounters The Threat of the Week
3) the team members have various doubts and self-defeatingness, mostly resolved through formal conflicts (i.e. drawing cards)
4) the team gets it together and overcomes The Threat -- mostly resolved outside the formal conflict system by us "just talking," i.e. the loosely structured Drama, i.e. brainstorming, the fostering of which is PTA's real greatest strength

Note that (4), where the reincorporation pay-off occurs, is too important[/i[ to be left to the mercy to the conflict resolution system -- in part because of our group's particular dynamics, but in part because the PTA rules really don't give you any structural help on how to reincorporate. (Compare Capes, where at least some kind of reincorporation is mechanically rewarded because the resolution of prior Conflicts gives you Inspiration bonuses on later Conflicts). If you consider that the finale episode was basically in the position of phase (4) for the entire season, it's no surprise that (a) reincorporation that didn't involve the team getting it together was a hard sell, and (b) how reincorporation actually happened was dealt with by "just talking," rather than by setting Stakes.

I'd further argue that this experience suggests that "Nobody Gets Hurt" is a fine philosophy but impossible to implement in Actual Play, precisely because two people of good will (i.e. no "dickery" going on) can honestly disagree on what they want to happen and, without realizing it until it's too late, come to want incompatible things. The only surefire way to ensure "Nobody Gets Hurt" is not to care enough to get hurt. Now, not caring too intensely is useful, because it is "only" fiction, after all: Tony was able to sacrifice his desired story outcome to the unity of our real-life team, and his hurt was manageable. But it does strike me that what Ron Edwards has been saying was (as usual, dammit) right all along: real greatness depends on a willingness to get hurt -- and, even, to inflict hurt.