I have been running a game of Spirit of the Century for the last couple of months and have been quite surprised by the results.

The intention was to run a game with a clear Narrativist Agenda, after finding games like HeroQuest and even Dogs in the Vinyard to have generally resulted in at least some incoherence. My aim was to at least have a game with a clear agenda under our belt so that it was possible to communicate these issues.

As it became clear that the structure of the story itself was a player responsibility in the game I was running, the group very quickly moved into discussions on plot structure issues. The most prevalent examples being in the use of declarations, which were often grabbed with both hands as a way of steering things. Mystic PCs using Fortune Telling being a favourite device.

My concern is that the discussions at this level have detracted from exploration such that it is possible to say that much less role-playing is actually occurring. I don't mean that in an 'acting in-character' way, more that exploration itself is being put aside for segments of the game in favour of meta issues.

This has occurred in two or three key moments of the game, where one might expect this to happen, once when the players were taking the initial situations and story threads that I had presented based on their Aspects and were deciding on what they considered interesting and where the story should lead (actively working out the premise); and twice so far towards the end of the game where it is clearly a player priority that the game comes to a satisfactory conclusion and the threads are tied together.

The enthusiasm for these discussion could just be based on novelty, and for me and a couple of the players these meta-discussions have been useful and quite fun, if a little disorientating, and for one player they have been useful but occasionally frustrating, but for one player they were enough for him to opt out of the game.

So, I wonder at this juncture, is this meta-game quality something that becomes more fluid and transparent as the players become used to it, or is it something that will always occur with such detail?

Has anyone else had similar experiences and how did the play style develop over time?

Example

Upon realising that he now had access to the big machine at the heart of the adventure, one player began discussing exactly what should happen in the scene once he had modified the device in preparation for his roll. And, before we knew it the discussion was involving everyone and pushing into areas well outside of the scene's context, detailing how each PC would be effected in the fallout of the action and how the whole scenario would conclude.

At which point I figured we were getting ahead of ourselves and insisted that start working through each action and see what transpired. The discussion did prove useful and inspired much of what then happened but it just felt a little too divorced from the action leaving me unclear on whether it was a good thing or not.

Note: My musings on this game have been documented on the blog linked in my sig, for background context.

Hi Jamie,

I can speak with some fierceness on this topic.

The discussions that you're seeing aren't Narrativist play. They're dodging play. They're a defense mechanism.

Narrativist play does not have any integral feature that requires discussing what will happen. One does not stop playing in order to negotiate about play. All the mechanics that you've seen across a number of games, including narration rights and scene-framing trading and stuff like that, are structure for play. But they don't stop play or hop away from it to decide stuff about it. The process of deciding "what happens next" is no difference from deciding "what my gu says next." The distinction between the two is artificial, an artifact of RPG culture to date.

Yes, the game provides for player authority over plot-structure and events - that's a great thing. But doing it is different from talking about it! The classic effect of such rules, when embraced, is actually to pump events and decisions into play at a far faster rate than traditional play, rather than slower. Or more accurately, the scenes and conflicts move more smoothly, at a pace that's suited for each scene. That's what happens when people do it. This discuss-it business is a red flag for me. Whenever I've seen it, I've been able to identify one or more people at the table who are shying away from actually playing.

Best, Ron

Hello,

I got a private message asking me if I was shutting down this discussion. The answer is, No! No way!

For one thing, I'm not in that group and haven't actually seen what's going on. For all I know, my red flag totally does not apply at all. Jamie has to let me know whether I'm on track, cross-referencing what I'm saying to what he knows is really going on. I'm interested to know that, and as a discussion group, we all need to know whether that's a viable avenue, or, just as productively, whether we can say "that's not it" and confidently turn our attention to something else.

For another, there may be some feature or perceived feature of Spirit of the Century which is making this phenomenon more likely, or conversely, which is inadvertently being ignored or de-emphasized in the group. So the discussion can illuminate the game itself, too.

Jamie, I look forward to what you can tell us.

Full disclosure: I wrote my post with an infant vocalizing into each ear (which makes two infants, you see), which I think meant the content is there, but the "how to use this post" is not.

Best, Ron

Hi Ron,

This thing you bring up is interesting to me. I think I've seen such a phenomenon occur when I'm playing these new-fangled story narrative games, but hadn't been aware to pay attention to it in detail, or that it might have a detrimental effect. So I'm not sure.

Could you come up with an example of happy "non-dodging" Narrativist play to contrast against Jamie's example, to better illustrate exactly what you're talking about?

I will offer as a different data point that such meta level discussions are not necessarily dodging play, although I accept the assertion that they often can be.

Myself, Keith Sears, Seth-Ben Ezra and his wife Crystal recently played a session of Shock where probably 1/3 to 1/2 of everything that "happened" plotwise developed out of meta-level discussions.  I won't say that's common with Shock or with this group, just what happened in this game.  It definitely was NOT dodging anything.

Instead I view it as akin to the literary / film / tv technique of the audience seeing stuff going on that isn't happening directly to the main characters.  The main character (the PC) is off doing something while the camera shows us a scene of the main character's wife cheating on him with his best friend.  The players in their role as Audience will often immediately grasp the implications of what's going to happen when the character finds out and be jazzed about seeing it play out.  The players in their role as authors and directors will often find it helpful to touch base on the topic...just like a stable of TV script writers will have to consider what this means for future episodes...e.g. "You know, if we let him find out before the big job is complete, that's totally going to invalidate the central conflict we've been building up to"..."yeah, but this other conflict would be cool too so maybe we should just roll with it in that direction".

I don't see these types of examples as "dodging" play at all.  Rather I see them embracing the option to play while wearing different hats than the traditional "player as actor" hat.  In fact, I've made the case before that refusing to put on the "player as author", "player as director", "player as audience" hats and engage with the game from time to time on those levels is actually itself a form of "dodging".

So Web, I don't see anything that automatically seems wrong in your write-up.  As with anything, however, it will help to have players who are on the same page regarding how frequently and at what times and for how long they are going to be putting on those other hats.  No different really from having the same expectations about how frequently dice will be rolled, or how much tactical thinking players will be putting into combat, or how much out of character knowledge players are allowed to use during play.  Just another variable to balance.

Hi Larry,

It will take me a couple of days to answer. I hit a crunch time.

Please, everyone, dive in and discuss!

Best, Ron

Web_Weaver, could you tell me to what degree these lengthy meta-discussions are taking place as an actual part of rules use and how much of it gets "nailed down" into the gamespace afterward? Do players use fate points to try and make anything from their discussions "true" - pile on additional declarations, in other words?

Like, in your last example, when the guy started talking about what to do with the big machine, and people started resolving the scenario ahead of time... how much did they expect the roll to resolve after that? What happens when things don't really go the way they "planned" it? Is the discussion more about what could happen, or what should happen?

I ask because by the rules, a declaration only resolves one "fact", and requires a roll (or fate points) to see if the person's right or wrong. So, unless it's all fate points all the time, someone using Fortune Telling shouldn't necessarily be able to guarantee any plot outcomes - they have just as much chance of being right as being wrong. And even if they buy their way into being right all the time, there's only so much one declaration will get you. So I'm curious as to how that blossoms into pre-structuring the plot, and then, how that pre-structuring feeds back into mechanics and resolution.

Also, does this meta-discussion take place when someone calls for a compel? How do compels usually happen in your games?

-L

Web_Weaver wrote:
As it became clear that the structure of the story itself was a player responsibility in the game I was running, the group very quickly moved into discussions on plot structure issues. The most prevalent examples being in the use of declarations, which were often grabbed with both hands as a way of steering things. Mystic PCs using Fortune Telling being a favourite device.

Ron wrote:
The discussions that you're seeing aren't Narrativist play. They're dodging play. They're a defense mechanism.

Valamir wrote:
Instead I view it as akin to the literary / film / tv technique of the audience seeing stuff going on that isn't happening directly to the main characters. 

Hey Landon,

You are on the money here with your example so I wont bother to quote you, I would need to quote it all.

The discussions are drifting far away from the rules; it is precisely this element of getting distracted from the actual roll at hand, I have to call a stop to it and remind them all that we haven't actually done the declaration roll.

And this in itself isn't that easy because the conversation starts naturally from the point of the roll but the gets away from all of us, and while I might be the first to notice we have slipped into waffle, I have had a hand in it by answering questions and generally listening to the cool stuff without calling it to order. This is why I wonder if its just something I need to be more sensitive to and will come with practice.

I have certainly enforced the one thing per declaration rule rigidly and that is where the contrast lies, you just described a load of stuff, lets roll for the first bit. But a lot of that extra conversation will come into the following exploration because it was great material, although sometimes its a battle to make sure it is still in the balance because the player that had an idea may get very attached to it, forgetting that it hasn't been explored yet.

The problem is that on one level it has been great fun, and has produced a game with a much higher creativity level than we are used to, where a lot more ideas are being flung around and a lot of them are sticking to the game (to strecth the analogy too far). It has also been a far more social experience where I haven't just enjoyed the game but enjoyed the company also, which sadly isn't always true in our games.

Noclue wrote:
Just so I'm clear, you've grafted the players have responsibility for the story structure idea to SOTC in order to get a "game with a clear Narrativist agenda?" Since I don't think SOTC does this on its own, I'm guessing talking about SOTC rules won't really be helping you.

Web_Weaver wrote:
I am more worried about the times when the players start going well beyond this and essentially stop playing and begin a process more akin to script writing.

"Oh that's cool if you do that then this could happen, and then this would be a cool scene, and then we could wrap up with this, wow!"

It seems to have started based on the Fortune Telling concept in SotC, which grants small and vague rights to the players to define something that might happen down the line of the story, and I haven't discouraged that because it is their story too, even when the fortune is more specific than the rules suggest. However, that seems to have sparked some players imaginations and they have grasped the nettle and started to use any Declaration as a story writing device and this seems to have slipped into a game pitched higher up in the meta game level, where it feels less like role-play and more like a TV writers room might feel.

Valamir wrote:
Actually that's my point.  I was pointing out that even if it does pitch higher up into the meta game that that's not necessarily an example of dodging play, and not necessarily a bad thing.

Your phrasing suggests that you're assuming this sort of thing is bad, or less fun, or less "role-playing".

I'm pointing out that it actually can be extremely good, produce great stories, lots of fun and is every bit as much role-playing as more traditional stay-in-character modes of play.

Cool.

If you ever have a chance to play Universalis (or have played), let me know whether that affects your thoughts on "writers room" stance.  About 80% of Uni play winds up feeling like that (by design) and its actually the exact analogy I use to get people into the spirit of how to think about play in the game.

Jamie,

I'm curious - what where your reasons for deciding to play the game with a clear Agenda in the first place, as well as for deciding on Narrativist Agenda specifically? Other than one player's issues with conflict mechanics, in what ways did the incoherence you noticed in the other games affect your satisfaction with play?

Recently, I've been considering how coherence/incogerence affects my gaming experience in the current group, at least as far as I understand the notion of CA's. It makes me wonder how in some games we seem to be much more in synch as a group than in others. So, seeing your explicit choice of CA, I'm curious.

Also, did you worked out the details of CA you were intending to follow, or was it rather just a general "let's stick to this area"?

Hi Filip,

That's a tricky question because, although I express myself with theory, I am am intuitive and empathetic person, and on that level things were really not going well when we played HeroQuest, there were a number of frustrations which were always present and were likely to boil over into real disagreement. This was resulting in an inordinate amount of bitching behind each others backs, and tangible level of disaffection with each other.

When I turned to theory I could feel that incoherence issues really were at the heart of the problems. That is not to say that encouraging a coherent view would sort out the interpersonal issues, but they would at least expose them as nothing to do with 'play'.

If I see two friends being unpleasant towards each other in the guise of play, and the unpleasantness is completely ignored as OK, because the game rules appear to say so, then I am the type of person that will point out the obvious. I feel on a gut level that many of our ongoing issues are exacerbated by going into a game without an understanding of the clashing views of what a role-playing game is. And without examples and language to clearly tease out these issues with the games themselves, there really is little hope that we will ever play together as a group of friends in any role-playing game, because what is habitually acceptable is not necessarily acceptable when we turn to a game like HeroQuest.

And a fundamental point is that the group was formed from a group of Runequest players of which three wanted to play HeroWars/HeroQuest, seeing its potential if not it's underlying modes, and the others just saw it as another rule set. But, that potential was probably different for each of us, and we only thought we were seeing the same things.

For the record I think HQ is seriously flawed in its presentation and contradictions, but I may be biased by my experiences playing with it.

So all that said, I proposed that we at least play some games with a clearer agenda so that we could actually get to grips with the muddled, and in my opinion disruptive on an interpersonal level, play that was resulting from HeroQuest. If the journey results in discarding any form of Narrativist play so be it, we would be in a much better position than we were. And, if it results in not playing at all, or some player deciding its not for them, then again that's much less likely to result in bitterness or alienation.

What has resulted is a very surprised group, who are constantly reassessing what role-playing is, and it has broadly been a positive experience, the current game of SotC has been remarkably successful from the perspective of explaining the concepts of Premise without having to explain it in words, and focusing in on issues of story control and theme. It has a pretty coherent feel in general as a rule set, given the ground work that had already been done in HeroQuest and Dogs.

And the players that have taken it up most enthusiastically are two of the players that saw HeroQuest as just another rule set, which means that we now have a much richer vocabulary to discuss these issues going forward.

Most positively it has been great fun to play for at least three or four of us. What we play next is going to be interesting, and some are suggesting a return to "just blowing stuff up" for a while or a letting off steam Paranoia game.

See, tricky stuff, a bit messy in the detail, but as honest and open as I can be in this context.

Steering this back on topic just in case my last post suggests anyone who comments is walking in a mine field (I was using self-reflection and emotional language to express the background frustrations of the group, please don't be put off, we are dealing with them slowly).

We finished off the SotC game last week and during the last session I was especially sensitive to the issues at hand, (talking about story instead of playing), and came to the conclusion that exactly the same thing is happening as was occurring in Dogs previously. The issue at hand is being discussed in a genuine spirit of meta-game story focus, but the discussion rapidly gets expanded and then once a sketch of future action has been drawn, it places undue expectation on a positive result from the rolls; lest the house of cards comes tumbling down.

In fact, it feels like the players are effectively de-protagonising themselves in the interest of the story.

Anyone seen this happen in their games?
Did anyone find a way to counter it?

The players most responsible, argue that the discussion is necessary, but I feel that much less detail would result in far more fluid play with little difference in the quality of story produced.

--

For example, in the session one PC had 'died' in the previous session , with an eye to there being a cool 'vision quest' for him to follow to allow his return. At the beginning of this the player clearly wanted this thread to tie in with the other players' actions so that it could be explored fully without hogging the spotlight. Ideas for how one character could join him were discussed, then how another character could act as a beacon to guide him back.

The discussion in itself took around ten minutes, but as far as I can tell both of the story crucial decisions had been made quite quickly and could have been over and dealt with in less than two.

At this point one of the involved players turned to me and said "so that's it isn't it, we don't need to roll do we?"

The remaining session conformed quite closely to the skeleton and although the player at the centre of the action expressed that they were willing to fail if the dice dictated, this was never likely, given the leverage a player can bring to bear on important rolls with Fate Points.

The players were happy with the outcome once the quest had been explored, and when questioned the player concerned felt that the discussion was worth it and expressed that he thinks we do better if we sketch out where we plan to go, even if the dice don't go our way.

I, on the other hand think there has to be a happier position which takes less time and places less pressure on the ongoing exploration.

Web_Weaver wrote:
The issue at hand is being discussed in a genuine spirit of meta-game story focus, but the discussion rapidly gets expanded and then once a sketch of future action has been drawn, it places undue expectation on a positive result from the rolls; lest the house of cards comes tumbling down.

I'm a bit out of practice with this and my conclusions might be way off-base, but I'm going to throw this out there.

I think what's happening is the same thing that happens in Sorcerer when the group has a definition of Humanity that no one really cares enough about.

What I mean is that I suspect that your Premises have not been sufficiently immediate and engaging to the players involved.

Both DitV and SotC are set in times different from our own.  This makes it a bit easier to wuss out, intentionally or not, and deal with the Premise at arms-length.  You end up looking forward at the possible plot twists because the current conflict does not have a choking grip on your heart.

In contrast, consider a Premise that the players really are deeply invested in.  They absolutely need, on a deep moral level, to win the current conflict that's facing them right now.  There's no room for discussion because there's no room for compromise.  Nothing I say to you is going to convince you that maybe you don't need to rescue your Jewish grandmother from the Nazi death camp.  Sure maybe it'll be great if she turns out to be a nuclear physicist with the plans for an entire atomic bomb in her brain, but there's no time for that now.

SotC is a great game, no question about it, but I think it subtly encourages the players to treat Premises in a shallow fashion.  It's one of the great classic pitfalls in Narrativism, and I suspect you've fallen in.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong with all of that with respect to your particular group.  But think about it, try it on, and let me know.

Cheers,
Roger

Web_Weaver wrote:
The issue at hand is being discussed in a genuine spirit of meta-game story focus, but the discussion rapidly gets expanded and then once a sketch of future action has been drawn, it places undue expectation on a positive result from the rolls; lest the house of cards comes tumbling down.

For example, in the session one PC had 'died' in the previous session , with an eye to there being a cool 'vision quest' for him to follow to allow his return. At the beginning of this the player clearly wanted this thread to tie in with the other players' actions so that it could be explored fully without hogging the spotlight. Ideas for how one character could join him were discussed, then how another character could act as a beacon to guide him back.

The discussion in itself took around ten minutes, but as far as I can tell both of the story crucial decisions had been made quite quickly and could have been over and dealt with in less than two.

At this point one of the involved players turned to me and said "so that's it isn't it, we don't need to roll do we?"

Landon wrote:
let part of that discussion very specifically be about what's going to the dice and what's not.

Roger wrote:
I'm a bit out of practice with this and my conclusions might be way off-base, but I'm going to throw this out there.

Web_Weaver wrote:
For example, in the session one PC had 'died' in the previous session , with an eye to there being a cool 'vision quest' for him to follow to allow his return. At the beginning of this the player clearly wanted this thread to tie in with the other players' actions so that it could be explored fully without hogging the spotlight. Ideas for how one character could join him were discussed, then how another character could act as a beacon to guide him back.

The discussion in itself took around ten minutes, but as far as I can tell both of the story crucial decisions had been made quite quickly and could have been over and dealt with in less than two.

At this point one of the involved players turned to me and said "so that's it isn't it, we don't need to roll do we?"

Noclue wrote:
It strikes me that Dante wrote a whole novel about a character trying to get out of the underworld.

Web_Weaver wrote:
I seem to have been seduced into helping the players write story, rather than challenging them to make the story meaningful to them. I introduced them to the tool box and they played with them, but they were not challenged to make anything other than practice pieces.