This thread is the next step in my quest to understand Story Now and how to give it to a new player who doesn't like Simulationism. It continues from What's Narrativist in Zero RPG?, and I'm quoting a couple of points brought up there. I'm letting go of Zero as my example and am using Serenity instead, since I actualy intend to start a campaign with that.

JB wrote:
McV did mention Serenity RPG as a possible example of a narrativist game though, and I can say a little something about why/how Serenity isn't narrativist.  Seems like we've likely moved beyond that on this thread though, and I don't want to threadjack,

FredGarber wrote: I believe Too Much Analysis Kills the Fun.   At some point, GMs and Players need to step away from the theory and say "knowing what I have learned, can I make my game session deliver more Moments of Awesome?" and try it out.

FredGarber wrote: Also yes: games based on TV shows (like Serenity) are often good vehicles for Narrativist Play.  Unfortunately, they tend to be designed around a Gamist/Sim bias: Unless your group is created to be a rag-tag band living on the frontier fringes of a civilized universe, taking whatever jobs they can to stay free, then there isn't really a whole lot of rules to the rule book.  What if the game was designed around, instead of a Guns rating, Jane has a Loyalty rating, and the dice roll isn't whether or not Jane can successfully shoot the Alliance guy kidnapping River, but does he shoot the bad guy or give in and turn over River?  It'd be a very different sort of character sheet.

FredGarber wrote: BTW: I think you nailed the important part of my hypothetical Serenity build: The challenge is directly about how the Story/Plot goes.  Note that that's just an example of how to use System Mechanics to push a game into Story Now mode, instead of using the current Serenity Mechanics, which push the game into Step Up or Support the Dream category.  You certainly can play any type of game with any System: But some Systems have a lot more pain and work on the part of the GM to reward different agendas.

Some basic themes can help involve the crew in the story you're creating in your role as Game Master.

I messed up a BBCode tag in that post. Is there any way I can fix that? This looks kinda awful.

Got the bbcode for you.

Okay, so, a super-quick summary of Story Now play. Straight outta Egri.

Passionate characters, in action according to their passions. They face opposition across the moral line(s) their passions represent. They're fit to take on the opposition, and the opposition is fit to take them on. They escalate, escalate and escalate, facing and going through the inevitable moral dilemmas that escalating against fit opposition across a moral line creates. Ultimately they reach a crisis, they break the opposition or it breaks them, and they resolve the drives of their passions.

(This process can be layered, at different scales: in Firefly on TV, each episode follows this process, and each episode is also an escalatory step in the larger conflicts of the series. When Mal compromises his "stay the hell away from the alliance" for the sake of his "Shepherd Book is part of my crew, so I save his life," that's a moment of resolution in the episode, and a moment of escalation in the series.)

With me?

So:

mcv wrote:
I guess one interesting Premise could be: "How much of a good guy can you afford to be?" (Am I correct in thinking this sort of question is what Story Now means by "Premise"?)

Hidden Secrets ... But while those are questions, I don't think they're premises. Or are they?

Freedom: The book says: "Freedom and what it truly means to be free is a strong underlying notion that should play a part in any Serenity campaign. What is the price of freedom? Should living safe be purchased at the cost of freedom?" Well, that was easy. The book literally mentions three interesting questions that might work as Premise: "What does it truly mean to be free?", "What is the price of freedom?" (and how about: "What price are you willing to pay?"), and "Should living safe be purchased at the cost of freedom?"

All of those sound excellent as Premise (at least if I understand Premise correctly), but I'm still at a loss as how to address them during play.

Let's not forget the theme I added:
Keep Flying: It's a popular quote in the game (it's the name of a chapter, even), and a theme of the TV show. Mal (the captain) feels like his land has been taken from him, and now he only has the sky left. "You can't take the sky from me" from the title song. In the pilot, he says "It's getting awful crowded in my sky." He wants to keep his ship flying, and to do that he needs a crew and money. But money is always a problem (and so is the crew, actually), and he often needs to resort to crime. That's easy when its a victimless crime (smuggling), or the victim is impersonal, evil and/or rich, but what if you find out that's not the real victim of your crime? Can you steal from hospitals, even if they're rich? What if you discover that the goods you were stealing are medicines headed for a poor, sickly community that really needs it? "What does it cost to keep flying?" and "Who are you willing to hurt?" Lots of moral dilemmas here, and moral dilemmas sound like a great way to address this premise.

Oh, and whether Serenity the rpg is going to make it easy or hard for you to address any of these, or another premise, in play... I don't know. I suspect hard, possibly prohibitively hard, but that's based on my own prejudice so don't take it too seriously. I haven't read the game.

-Vincent

Vincent: That's why he's has his own principle...  he explains it all.

As a clarification to my Jane Loyalty roll, after I've had two days or so for my subconscious to work on it, you're right.  That would take the character out of the player's hands too forcefully.  I'd probably come up with some sort of Stat - based challenge, where the GM challenges Jane's Weakness (Loyalty to the crew) by offering him some of his Needs (Violence, Wealth, or both), and Jane's player depends upon his Strengths to give him bonuses to the roll.  If I win, he adds to the story my way.  If he wins, I narrate it his way.  But, that's getting "Thread Drifty," and would belong back in First Thoughts.  This is Actual Play.  Let me dig out my Serenity rules from the Gaming Closet, and maybe by the time I read it, you might have a question left (before all the other brilliant people here give you better advice than I could ;)

I tried to run a Serenity / Traveller game, and ran RIGHT INTO this too.  However, much of my group wanted a sort of game where they were playing out an imaginary Serenity Spin off, and so the game was very much about the "Shared Dream."  There was friction over the crew's choices, but people were more interested in Seeing the 'Verse (Exploring Setting) and witty exchanges of banter (Exploring Characters).  It was pretty Awesome, but not Narrativist play

Good luck.
-Fred

lumpley wrote: Got the bbcode for you.

Okay, so, a super-quick summary of Story Now play. Straight outta Egri.

Passionate characters, in action according to their passions. They face opposition across the moral line(s) their passions represent. They're fit to take on the opposition, and the opposition is fit to take them on. They escalate, escalate and escalate, facing and going through the inevitable moral dilemmas that escalating against fit opposition across a moral line creates. Ultimately they reach a crisis, they break the opposition or it breaks them, and they resolve the drives of their passions.

(This process can be layered, at different scales: in Firefly on TV, each episode follows this process, and each episode is also an escalatory step in the larger conflicts of the series. When Mal compromises his "stay the hell away from the alliance" for the sake of his "Shepherd Book is part of my crew, so I save his life," that's a moment of resolution in the episode, and a moment of escalation in the series.)

mcv wrote:
I guess one interesting Premise could be: "How much of a good guy can you afford to be?"

To make "how much of a good guy can you afford to be?" stick as a premise, you'll need (a) characters who are passionately committed to being good guys, in (b) situations where being a good guy is incompatible with surviving financially, with (c) something to force the issue, to bring inescapable urgency to the question.

Hidden Secrets ... But while those are questions, I don't think they're premises. Or are they?

I don't figure they are either. They don't have much moral dimension, do they? Same with backstory questions like "why don't you fit into normal society?"

Answering these questions is often, not always, part of revealing the characters' passions in action, and they're often, not always, fruitful territory to mine for conflict and opposition - but they don't make passionate characters in conflict with fit opposition across a moral line all by themselves.

Freedom: The book says: "Freedom and what it truly means to be free is a strong underlying notion that should play a part in any Serenity campaign. What is the price of freedom? Should living safe be purchased at the cost of freedom?" Well, that was easy. The book literally mentions three interesting questions that might work as Premise: "What does it truly mean to be free?", "What is the price of freedom?" (and how about: "What price are you willing to pay?"), and "Should living safe be purchased at the cost of freedom?"

All of those sound excellent as Premise (at least if I understand Premise correctly), but I'm still at a loss as how to address them during play.

The only one of those that really works for me is the last: should living safe be purchased at the cost of freedom. (That's because "should" brings the moral dimension, where "are you willing" leaves it out.) Anyway, to address it in play, you need (a) (b) and (c) above: characters passionately committed to their freedom, in a situation where their living safety is in genuine conflict with their freedom, with some internal or external force that makes the question immediate and urgent.

It's really important, while we're here, to point out that for a premise to work, it has to be a genuinely open question. "We died for our freedom" has to be absolutely and genuinely a possible outcome.

You left out loyalty! Firefly is a show all about loyalty. The whole crew is in a constant state of "to whom do you owe your loyalty? What should you compromise to stay loyal? How should you respond to another's disloyalty? To, worse, your own? When your loyalty to one person conflicts with your loyalty to another, what should you do?"

Hi mcv,

Is there anything that...scares you about your own life? It's a bit of a private question - I'm asking merely to raise the idea rather than asking for an answer here. For example, a hard one is, what if I conceive a child and it has down syndrome? Would I get an abortion?

I imagine there's a short shocked silence to that one from all reading, but that's exactly my point - I'm not bringing up some fantasy, far away moral dilemma. If it was too much, just dismiss me as another internet weirdo and skip the rest of the post, that's ok.

With some things that scare you, perhaps you've made your choice. But with other scary things, you may have doubts about how to deal with it (perhaps even as you deal with it a certain way in real life).

Can you imagine exploring those doubts in a game? Perhaps draping it in metaphor and space ships, to make it less horrifically close to home? But basically it's those doubts actually explored.

I don't definately know myself if that's to do with the definition of nar. But I do tend to think that pure fantasy moral dilemmas that are harmoginised and sealed off from what shares the shit out of you probably will have you indeed dilute your understanding of story now.

Wow. I think Vincent covered the 'themes' so I'll keep my comments there to a minimum. 

I'd second the idea that some of the 'themes' in the Serenity text aren't 'Themes' or Premises in the specific sense that we're using the word, but are more like motifs or tropes.  They're not using the word to mean something as specific as we are here though, and the Premises have been identified, so no problems there.

I'd also emphasize that you absolutely must give the players the authority to decide what side of the issue they come down on, and the power to influence how they addresses that issue.  You and the whole group needs to be open to the players answering 'yes' OR 'no' to the 'premise question' and for them to go into tragedy OR triumph to make their argument.  Some of that can be established before you start playing, but some of it is going to have to come from the play itself.

Got a game of my own to get to, so I'll have to leave off here. I'll try to get an analysis of the Serenity RPG up tomorrow, along with what I see as the potential stumbling blocks to using it as a vehicle for Story Now, as well as some thoughts on what you might do to get around those.  I'm also not convinced it's worth the effort, but I really sympathize with your situation so... Onward!

I also see there's a couple of new posts up since I read through this thread earlier, so my apologies for any confusion if this is crossposted.

Cheers,

J

MCV, I want so much to say, "Use all the cool setting stuff from your Serenity RPG book (because it is pretty damn cool), and use my game The Rustbelt with the Frontier Suns mod included therein for everything else," because it presents so damn clearly a particular take on the Firefly thing (i.e. my particular take on the coolest, most cutting Premise that can be derived from it), with a built-to-specs system for that take.  Because, even if it isn't your take, or a take you like, I think you'd find it helpful.  But the damned thing isn't ready yet.  That, and I'd look like a self-promoting ass.  Arrrg.

-Marshall

Oh, hell, lemme see what I can do anyway.

Okay, so, this particular take on the Firefly thing revolves around the Black.  Right, a colloquialism for the vast emptiness of space, but here also a metaphor for isolation.  This being roleplaying we're talking about, we can treat metaphor as something that acts and has an agenda and does shit to people.  So, we explore what isolation does to people.  Isolation, as in how the outer planets are isolated from the central planets, and what that did to those outer planets and the people living on them, and what that allows the Alliance to do to the folks on the outer planets as the distance diminishes their apparent humanity.  Isolation, as in my planet is separated from yours by space, so we're different and apart from each other.  Isolation, as in the only connection between your ship and my ship is a video screen that I can turn off if I want, and doing so will make it a lot easier for me to kill your ship for food and fuel.  Isolation, as in I'm just looking out for me and mine, and I don't have time or energy to take up for you too.  Isolation, as in "She's wanted by the Feds; they'll give me money if I turn her in; if I protect her, I'm in danger; hmm...."

For my money, this grabs everything in the Firefly canon, from Train Job to the movie.

By treating the Black as if it were a character, you can make it work to isolate and divide people and thus open up the door for desperate and despicable behavior.  You can do things like have it take away resources so that people might have to do something unsavory or despicable to get by; you can put people in a situation where a despicable, self-serving, and even murderous act can go unpunished (or seems like it can); you can drive wedges between friends, by having the pressure of all the hardship, desperation, and isolation hammer on their nerves until they lash out at each other.  There's lots of tricks.  But the thing is, you give them opportunity to be horrible, and good reason to be horrible, and then watch to see if they act horribly to get by, or nobly despite the cost, or manage to find a balance somehow.  And then you challenge their choice.  And re-challenge it.  And so on.

I'm not good at stating Premises, but there's one in there.  With considerable houseruling, you can do it with Serenity RPG.  My consternation above is based on the fact that The Rustbelt + "Frontier Suns" mod is custom-made for this very thing (right down to having rules for the Black acting as a character).

Marshall wrote:
MCV, I want so much to say, "Use all the cool setting stuff from your Serenity RPG book (because it is pretty damn cool), and use my game The Rustbelt with the Frontier Suns mod included therein for everything else," because it presents so damn clearly a particular take on the Firefly thing (i.e. my particular take on the coolest, most cutting Premise that can be derived from it), with a built-to-specs system for that take.  Because, even if it isn't your take, or a take you like, I think you'd find it helpful.  But the damned thing isn't ready yet.  That, and I'd look like a self-promoting ass.

I never -played- the Serenity RPG, but I did create a character and read the rulebook with the intention of drifting it Story Now.

While the setting has awesome potential for addressing premises, and the book mentions a few of these premises in passing, I don't think there's much in the rules that I would want to steal for narrativist purposes.

To start off, the game puts a lot of emphasis on "Then the GM decides what is best." This can be extremely obstructive to addressing premises, such as the concept of "How much of a team player/rat bastard can I be?" - The rules explicitly states that the GM decides how much the character must be adhering to a team - and thus there is no question about it by the time we get to play, because the GM has already decided it pre-play. I would say that the rules imply that however much of a team player you've established your character to be is an informal contract with the GM, which means it can't be dynamic and change in response to meaningful game events - That premise, as a component of story that is composed in the moment, is effectively dead in the water.

Like most trad game systems, the disadvantage system is the most tempting to the story-now-drifter. Especially with a few key disadvantages like Secret. But Secret is pretty much drowned out in a sea of very generic disadvantages I'd be hard pressed to try to squeeze story out of, like being mildly whacky or antisocial. This more or less defeats the plot point mechanic as a meaningful story engine, as people aren't as likely to be getting brownie points for revealing secrets as they are for having a bum leg or being mildly irriatating or whatever.

I wouldn't peg it as impossible to drift the -game rules- in a Story Now direction, but I don't really see the benefit of doing so compared to just using the setting in combination of a game that is already a decent fiction engine.

- Sean Musgrave

I'd personally still like to take Serenity RPG apart and see what we could change to better facilitate Story Now.  Even if there are better vehicles out there, in terms of setting and mechanics both, I think it might be educational and illustrative both for understanding the big model and as an exercise in game (re)design.

Some of my players might answer up front: "Not a lot, really." or: "If there's profit in it." which is of course something that needs to be prevented. The up front part, at least. If during play they decide that being a good guy is just too hard in this setting, then I suppose that's their answer. Then I need to lower the bar, to figure out how low their standards for being a good guy really are. (a).

sirogit wrote:
To start off, the game puts a lot of emphasis on "Then the GM decides what is best." This can be extremely obstructive to addressing premises, such as the concept of "How much of a team player/rat bastard can I be?" - The rules explicitly states that the GM decides how much the character must be adhering to a team - and thus there is no question about it by the time we get to play, because the GM has already decided it pre-play.

I would say that the rules imply that however much of a team player you've established your character to be is an informal contract with the GM, which means it can't be dynamic and change in response to meaningful game events - That premise, as a component of story that is composed in the moment, is effectively dead in the water.

Like most trad game systems, the disadvantage system is the most tempting to the story-now-drifter. Especially with a few key disadvantages like Secret. But Secret is pretty much drowned out in a sea of very generic disadvantages I'd be hard pressed to try to squeeze story out of, like being mildly whacky or antisocial.

This more or less defeats the plot point mechanic as a meaningful story engine, as people aren't as likely to be getting brownie points for revealing secrets as they are for having a bum leg or being mildly irriatating or whatever.

I wouldn't peg it as impossible to drift the -game rules- in a Story Now direction, but I don't really see the benefit of doing so compared to just using the setting in combination of a game that is already a decent fiction engine.

About Loyalty as a premise: Yeah, it's a big theme on the show.  Depending on where you want to go during play, you may not want to make it a primary theme in your game.

Lemme toss out the biggest difference between 'Premise' in a game and 'Premise' in something like a novel or a script. 

* In a novel, the theme is 'asked and answered' by the author.  As a reader or viewer,  it's all there already, just waiting for you to uncover it.  And as the author, you can answer the question first and then very carefully construct and assemble the pieces  in order to 'state your case'.

* In a game, you're starting by asking the question and then answering it thru play.  In that respect, it's similar to what the author does, but without anywhere near the level of control over the story that an author has.  And since you don't have total control over everything in the story, you don't always know just what's gonna happen next or what side of the argument the final tally is going to be on, which is pretty similar to the role of the reader or viewer.

Let me tie this into the Loyalty thing: You watch Firefly and the Loyalty question comes up a lot. 

Let's state a Premise of, "Which is more important, being loyal or getting the gold?" (I'm over simplifying - most good premises are going to be a bit broader or deeper, like the ones Vincent poses above.  This lets you approach the question from more angles, and thus build a more convincing answer.  But let's keep this simple so the example doesn't become a novel itself.)

As observed in the show, the characters most often come down on the 'pro-loyalty' side of the issue.  By the end of the episode you're left with a pretty compelling 'argument' for choosing to be loyal when the question comes up.  I could state this Theme in a number of ways, but lets go with, "Loyalty is more valuable than money." 

Cool. By taking those characters and putting them in those situations, having them take the actions they do and presenting the consequences of those actions, Joss Wedon or whoever makes a case for 'Loyalty'.  Notice that you can do this by making positive or negative examples of characters - if Jayne chooses 'Take the money and to hell with being Loyal' and then dies in a hail of gunfire, it's making a pretty strong argument for loyalty.

But here's the rub: If you're going to play a Story Now game and make the story about loyalty, the game has to be open to the other side of the argument.  What about the movie where everyone's trying to screw everyone else for some prize, and the most ruthless guy wins? It's still about loyalty, still asking, "Which is more important, being loyal or getting the gold?" but the final tally comes down on the side of, "Gold is more valuable than being loyal." (Again, I'm simplifying for the sake of example. That kind of film is going to have  Premise/Theme of something like, "There is no true loyalty when this kind of money is involved, so go for the damn gold!")

So finally, we get where I'm going with all of this: 

Joss Wedon can decide to make his show about loyalty and ensure that the show comes out as an argument for loyalty by showing that loyalty is consistently the best choice. 

If YOU make your game about Loyalty, you may end up with an argument for or against loyalty - Characters could be loyal and victorious, or disloyal and defeated, or loyal and defeated, or disloyal and victorious - and noone knows at the beginning how it's going turn out in the end. 

That's cool, and that's why I would play that game.  (Mountain Witch, anyone?) But I'm not going to make 'Loyalty' a Premise of play if I don't want to open the doors to those options.  You can set it up so 'loyalty' isn't really an issue to be addressed thru play, and focus on other things instead.

Okie, this is getting long and I still haven't gotten around to deconstructing the Serenity RPG.  I'm still willing to do that, but if the option is there to play Dogs In The Vineyard, or even just read the game, I would say do that first.  That'll give you more traction for getting a grip on this 'Narrative/Story Now' thing than revamping Serenity, IMO - The analogy that occurs to me is this: If you want to know what it's like to ride a race bike, just take Vincent's excellent machine out for a spin. Then we'll worry about hotrodding a Serenity 650 for the track.

Cheers,
J

JB wrote:
Okie, this is getting long and I still haven't gotten around to deconstructing the Serenity RPG.  I'm still willing to do that, but if the option is there to play Dogs In The Vineyard, or even just read the game, I would say do that first.  That'll give you more traction for getting a grip on this 'Narrative/Story Now' thing than revamping Serenity, IMO - The analogy that occurs to me is this: If you want to know what it's like to ride a race bike, just take Vincent's excellent machine out for a spin. Then we'll worry about hotrodding a Serenity 650 for the track.

I think it's important to recognize that the game won't make play Narrativist unless the players do, and we're always cautioning people not to put their hopes into games or expect games to change their play groups just by whipping out a game. So I'm on-board with the suggestion of "play some Narrativist RPGs" to get your feet wet and hopefully see how they work (or might work in the right environment), but I'm also wary of the suggestion as well because it isn't going to be a magic bullet.

So, yes, do it. It's a good step towards understanding! But don't put a whole bunch of expectations into play, just have fun.

This has been an awesome thread.

I want to expand on some of the points Marshall brought up and tie them back specifically to Firefly.

Marshall wrote, "right down to having rules for the Black acting as a character," in reference to having the thematic Issues personified by characters within an RPG game.

It's important to note that that Firefly, and the movie Serenity, do this already. 

The Reavers.  The Alliance scientists who experimented on the population of Miranda.  The damage that was done to River (making her almost another person when her "possession" clicked on.)

It is not possible to overstate the importance of this.

Many people, when they discuss Firefly in RPG terms, always discuss the crew, the ship, the bits.  But they seem to fail to notice that the arc of the first and only season was built around River and the experiments of the Alliance.  (Not in this thread, but in general.)

The original, two hour pilot lays all this out clearly.  For the first hour we're introduced to the characters, we have terrific Joss Whedon banter and so forth.  But at the mid-point of the pilot, River -- naked, vulnerable and terrified -- crawls out of the freeze unit.  The show changes at this point -- you simply can't have a girl that exposed and freaked out without changing the rules.  The rules are changed because something is wrong. 

No matter all the other moral complications, River, the Alliance experiments, and the Reavers are the other side of the moral coin, dramatized and personified.  There is no show without this.

(I'll add quickly that Whedon conceived of the show as a seven year arc.  Many of the plot elements of Serenity are from what would have been the second season.  The original two hour pilot, which I just watched again tonight and is amazing television, was deemed too moody by the FOX executives, who demanded a happier captain and bigger than life characters.  In short, the tv series was not the tv series that Whedon actually envisioned.  To get that, watch the original two hour pilot, and then watch Serenity.)

So, Martjin, as you think about your Firefly game, keep in mind that the show isn't just a crew running around doing space hijinks.  To make it a Firefly story, you'll have to find that way of making the Blackness literal -- personified by characters and their actions. 

Moreover, there will need to be something wrong -- a transgression that anchors the show morally but still creates ambiguity.  Remember, no one lives with more freedom in the Firefly universe than the Reavers.  They live by no rules and break every taboo of human culture.  They are the embodiment of The Black... and every character in the show has to place themselves on the spectrum of freedom to better or worse effect.

Without the GM manifesting these moral issues with transgressive actions and characters for the PCs to interact with, you don't have Firefly, you have Guys Running Around Making Money in Space.  Which might be fun.  But it will gut the attempt to grab after what made the show actually work.

Christopher wrote:
This has been an awesome thread.

Moreover, there will need to be something wrong -- a transgression that anchors the show morally but still creates ambiguity.  Remember, no one lives with more freedom in the Firefly universe than the Reavers.  They live by no rules and break every taboo of human culture.  They are the embodiment of The Black... and every character in the show has to place themselves on the spectrum of freedom to better or worse effect.

Without the GM manifesting these moral issues with transgressive actions and characters for the PCs to interact with, you don't have Firefly, you have Guys Running Around Making Money in Space.  Which might be fun.  But it will gut the attempt to grab after what made the show actually work.

One of the ways I brought Color to my Serenity game was that I used the fact that Serenity's 'Verse grew out of Joss reading a book on the Post-Civil War era Southern US.
So I took real "wild west" things, and repainted them in Serenity colors.  There can be plenty of bad situations where the 'city slickers' (Alliance) didn't deal with the Frontiersmen (Browncoats) well. 

You could steal from Blazing Saddles/HHGTG, and have Blue Sun build a "commercial shipping route" right through a series of solar systems/planets, and so they are trying to convince everyone that these planets need to be depopulated, all the while they are buying up the land cheap and building rest stops with gas stations and roadside entertainment and raking in all the profits that ordinary entrepeneurs might have gotten, just by living on the right planet at the right time.

Stealing Land from People is Wrong, and it also can have echoes to the current economic Crisises (sp?) today, because these settlers are losing their homes to a big business, concerned only with profits and not sustainable economic activity.

-Fred

In a SF setting, I don't see land being very relevant for shipping routes. What is interesting, however, is resources. Perhaps a crook or small corporation discovers valuable resources on some frontier moon, chases/scares the owners off, builds their own commercial infrastructure there, and then informs a bigger corp that's better able to exploit the find. Now it's the crook or small corp that gets to profit from the big corp's operation, when it should have been the original population.

Makes for an interesting adventure (or a couple of them even), but I don't see it as a Big Wrong to uncover during a prolonged campaign.

(Wait, isn't that Once Upon A Time In The West?)

I'd say everyone in the firefly universe lives with as much freedom as the reavers. As I understand reavers, it's not that they have freedom, it's what they do with it.

What all characters do with it is the question. What's interesting is that even if someone devotes themselves to some philosophy of only doing this or that, they still have that freedom regardless of how much they devote themselves to it. That's why play can't get stagnant - it doesn't matter if a character becomes a big peace hippy - he still has the freedom to become a mass murderer. Will he?

As opposed, I think (I'm not sure) to simulationist play. Where if your guys a big peace hippy, he stays that way and that's the fun of play, that things stay the same way and show an integrity that almost makes them tangible.

Christopher wrote:
Marshall wrote, "right down to having rules for the Black acting as a character," in reference to having the thematic Issues personified by characters within an RPG game.

It's important to note that that Firefly, and the movie Serenity, do this already. 

The Reavers.  The Alliance scientists who experimented on the population of Miranda.  The damage that was done to River (making her almost another person when her "possession" clicked on.)

It is not possible to overstate the importance of this.

Marshall wrote: Back then, he cared about people and things. A lot of people and things. Now, he just cares about "me and mine." That is, until the final act of Serenity, when he decides to make a stand for all the dead of Miranda.

Christopher wrote:
The thing about Story Now game is the flexibility of the statement about what the Protagonist values.  It can slide all over the map during play, rising to a climax of one kind or another where the character commits, through action, to a final big decision about the thematic content.

As Callan points out, the characters of Story Now can shift their bearings and decisions all of the place. In fact, its a good game where the thematic issues get tested in a variety of ways -- with different emotions, relationships and responsibilities.  That's how we find out who the character really is.

Oh, crap, Martijn, I called you "Mathijs." Sorry. The similar use of J confused me.

Marshall wrote: And if you're looking at those options and saying, "But that's not what Mal's like!" then, well, that's EXACTLY my point...

Marshall wrote:
Take Mal, for instance. The Black got to him when the Browncoats lost the war, and it ripped a big chunk out of him. We never see the bottom of the hole that this left; we see only glimpses of it, in "War Stories" and "Out of Gas" and the last act of Serenity. But the hole is obvious:
"In the time of war, we woulda never left a man behind."
"Yeah, well maybe that's why we lost."

Back then, he cared about people and things. A lot of people and things. Now, he just cares about "me and mine." That is, until the final act of Serenity, when he decides to make a stand for all the dead of Miranda.

What you need is something that provides authoring tools: stuff that helps players address Premise by calling attention to the issues and providing "handles" to make conflict easier to establish, complicate, and escalate for maximally engaging stories. Some examples are Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday, Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel, Humanity and Lore in Sorcerer, and the Psyche and Push mechanics in The Rustbelt (yeah, I referenced my own game again, whatcha gonna do about it?). As a matter of fact, any of these could be made to work for a Firefly-themed Narrativist roleplaying experience. But none of them would be easy to "drop in" to Serenity RPG. And, while you can get along without something like this, it's that much easier when you have it.

Christopher wrote:
As Callan points out, the characters of Story Now can shift their bearings and decisions all of the place. In fact, its a good game where the thematic issues get tested in a variety of ways -- with different emotions, relationships and responsibilities.  That's how we find out who the character really is.

Marshall wrote:
Yes! And this is precisely the distinction between the "reinforcement mechanics" and "authoring mechanics" that I made. Reinforcement mechanics are there to keep everything where it's supposed to be. In Serenity RPG, Mal's player gets Plot Points when his "Credo" trait gets him into trouble because Mal won't break a deal or whatever, because that's what happens in Firefly.

On the other hand, if we were to do this with The Rustbelt, where Mal has a Faith trait labeled "Always hold your end of a bargain," the player will get a choice about whether to break the deal or not, and, whichever he picks, the Psyche mechanics provide support and reward in the form of fuel for making plot and transforming character. In particular, keeping the deal would enable him to be more effective when trying to do so, by allowing the player to use the "Push" mechanic to overcome a failed roll -- while breaking the deal forces the player to choose whether Mal a.) decides he doesn't care and loses the Faith, b.) feels bad about it and takes on a Woe trait (which will haunt him), or decides that he liked doing it and takes on a Vice trait related to conning folks.

And if you're looking at those options and saying, "But that's not what Mal's like!" then, well, that's EXACTLY my point. These kinds of rules are for creating your own story, not celebrating someone else's. That's the difference between authoring and reinforcement.

Christopher wrote:
And I would go even further.  Go watch the pilot.  Watch how Mal is ready to turn in Simon and River...  Mal doesn't even act like Mal sometimes!

We've laid out what sort of qualities Martjin is looking for in a game.  But now the question: how can he do this now?

Marshall wrote:
Oh, crap, Martijn, I called you "Mathijs." Sorry. The similar use of J confused me.

Is that an intentional Firefly quote? Didn't Niska say something like that when he tortured Mal to "meet the real you"?

Though it would be an unavoidable choice from a game perspective, because Simon and River are protagonists too, and it wouldn't make much of a game if you kick PCs out as if they were NPCs.

Callan wrote:
Also, from what I've seen, didn't Mel give back the advance payment on the train robbery? He didn't break the deal - he declined it and handed back the advance payment. He found a way to fit his own values into the situation (though I imagine it was a painful one - he needs the cash)

Though it would be an unavoidable choice from a game perspective, because Simon and River are protagonists too, and it wouldn't make much of a game if you kick PCs out as if they were NPCs.

Look no, your screwing up address of premise/nar by forcing a character choice 'in the interest of a better story'

If you were setting it up as a group, you just do a bit of story before - before play you talk about characters you'd all like to see. Then you'd ask each other 'would they all stay on the ship'?

I could imagine a group that might have a few characters 'kicked out' by a Mel character during the brainstorming (and hell, maybe Mel might get kicked out - this is brain storming a campaign, not sticking to formula), before someone suggests River and Simon 'Aww, yeah, he'd take them, but only just!' 'GREAT, were good to go!'

As opposed to traditional character gen, where everyone goes off on their own to make characters in secret, then they find at play they just wouldn't be together (and worse, nar play is then fucked up because 'in the interest of a better story' character choices are forced into accepting each other).

mcv wrote:
Personally, while I appreciate escalating conflict as a basis for a good story in roleplaying (I don't have any experience with it, mind you), I'm not really willing to give up on the Dream altogether. I think, for me and a couple of other players in my group at least, the best games would have a bit of both. Or is that just Narrativism firmly gounded in Exploration? I do like immersion, in any case.

But none of those quite fits what happens in The Train Job. There, Mal breaks a deal, because he realises the deal would hurt people he doesn't want to hurt. He doesn't lose the Faith, he doesn't feel bad about it, and he doesn't like breaking deals either. He breaks it because it conflicts with something more important.

Another issue I'm still having with using game mechanics to drive story, is that game mechanics can be "gamed": manipulated for profit. I have no idea what Vice and Woe traits do, but they don't sound good. So that'd make Mal's choice one between gaining a bonus for sticking to his Faith, or gaining a new trait that he might not want. To me, that feels like interfering with his freedom to take his own responsibility for his choices. But maybe that's the simulationist in me.

Martijn,

Usually when folks play Story Now games, there are a few assumptions built into play:

1) There may or may not be a "group" the PCs belong to.  Even if they start as a group, the fact that the Players are have full freedom to make any choices they want for their PCs might mean the group might fracture and the PCs might even be at each other's throats before the characters finish their stories

2) Any conflicts between characters are between CHARACTERS -- not the Players.  The Players are working cooperatively to build story... Story might entail conflict between characters.  (See betrayals and shifting alliances between Jayne and Mal in Firefly, or the shifting alliances among the crew of Battlestar Galactica, the strike team unit in The Shield, the citizens of Deadwood, and so on as examples.)

3) There is no expectation as to how things should be or will end up.  At all.  Initial circumstances are created -- and then we start rolling with the story and find out how it's all going to end up.  No one, neither the GM nor the Players, can have an agenda or expectations about the way things are going go to be or supposed to be.  I can only point, again, to the shows listed above to show how wonderfully varied stories can be once one leaves the "team" mentality behind.

I'm currently GMing a Sorcerer game in the setting of Traveller.  My three players created a rich and detailed military background and intertwined history for their PCs.  They decided they have a ship, run a merc crew.  And then play began... last night one PC was desperately trying to save the religious leader from a mob while another PC trained his weapon on the leaders head, afraid of the trouble the woman would bring to his crew and his friends.  It was an incredibly involved struggle for the three PCs as they tried to protect each other -- but also knew that they might come to blows with each other because of their own agendas that might transcend their friendships.  (It feels very much like BSG, actually.  Two of the PCs have smuggled a nuke onto their ship to use against their enemies (just in case), even though the third PC, the ship's captain, has explicitly forbidden this action.)

The PCs and their merc crew were hired to put down a rebellion on a corporate controlled world, and arrived to find the rebellion backed by a religious jihad with actual, metaphysical angels providing support.  Two of the PCs have their own reasons for being moved by the angels, and might end up either siding with the jihad before all is said and done, or trying to tap the power of the Angels for their own needs.

By the time we're done with all this, the PCs might have all killed each other or might be stronger friends than they were before.  We just don't know.  And that's part of the fun.  Everyone is playing from the perspective of their characters and the fiction... it's emotional and visceral and not academic or intellectual at all -- in part because the Player have the freedom to make any choice they want for their PCs out of the fiction as defined up to that point. 

So, before I go any further, do you have questions about playing this way?  Is this something you can see working?  Does it interest you?  Why or why not?

Hi Martijn,

Ah, okay, you were already saying that stuff. Righto, good stuff! Anyway doesn't hurt to repeat them a bit :)

But that wasn't part of the deal. The deal was that he did the job, and he didn't. Returning the money make it okay for him, but that didn't make it okay for Niska. And Niska's henchmen made it clear that returning the money wasn't good enough.

Just a quick comment on the observation that players will 'game' mechanics for benefit.  This is true, but a game that's well designed to promote Story Now won't make one side of the choice clearly 'better' in terms of profit.

Since you don't have any nar games to refer to yet, consider this extremely rough and overly specific example.

Imagine a game where Mal's player gets Points!* for 'looking out for his' and acting so they don't come to harm.  And the player gets to choose NPCs who are 'his' - they go on a list on the character sheet.  But if one of the characters on that list does come to harm, or the player wants to take someone off the list, then Mal's player looses Points!

You're going to end up with a character that acts very much like Mal does in the show - you don't want to make everyone 'yours' because you can't look out for them all and will end up in the hole on Points! - but you do need to make some people 'yours' in order to get those gooey, chewy, candy-like Points!

And with a character like that, as the GM, you'd toss a big string of 'NPCs in need' at the player and let him decide whether to mark them, and throw threats at all his marked characters with great regularity.  Which is pretty much what the script did to Mal - So, who do you help? Who do you leave to hang? If two of yours are in danger, you try to save em both, but what if you have to choose just one and the benefits are equal for both? - Those choices are where the player has to engage and say something about who's more important - yer sister or yer lover, or whatever.

The player is going to gain Points! in some places, and importantly, loose Points! in others - but he wants to come out on the positive ('in the black'. Ha!) and also most importantly, the choices he makes trying to maximize the gain and minimize the loss will be interesting.

* Points! could be whatever desirable currency you have in your game.  In most games, the reward currency can be spent on character improvement of some kind, be that stats, equipment, whatever.  That'd work well in this example, as by making the character more effective, the player would be able to take responsibility for ever more NPCs and use them to get more Points! in a big ol' cycle.  But whatever they are, players want 'em.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program..
J

Christopher wrote:
1) There may or may not be a "group" the PCs belong to.  Even if they start as a group, the fact that the Players are have full freedom to make any choices they want for their PCs might mean the group might fracture and the PCs might even be at each other's throats before the characters finish their stories

3) There is no expectation as to how things should be or will end up.  At all.  Initial circumstances are created -- and then we start rolling with the story and find out how it's all going to end up.  No one, neither the GM nor the Players, can have an agenda or expectations about the way things are going go to be or supposed to be.  I can only point, again, to the shows listed above to show how wonderfully varied stories can be once one leaves the "team" mentality behind.

I'm currently GMing a Sorcerer game in the setting of Traveller.  My three players created a rich and detailed military background and intertwined history for their PCs.  They decided they have a ship, run a merc crew.  And then play began... last night one PC was desperately trying to save the religious leader from a mob while another PC trained his weapon on the leaders head, afraid of the trouble the woman would bring to his crew and his friends.  It was an incredibly involved struggle for the three PCs as they tried to protect each other -- but also knew that they might come to blows with each other because of their own agendas that might transcend their friendships.  (It feels very much like BSG, actually.  Two of the PCs have smuggled a nuke onto their ship to use against their enemies (just in case), even though the third PC, the ship's captain, has explicitly forbidden this action.)

By the time we're done with all this, the PCs might have all killed each other or might be stronger friends than they were before.  We just don't know.  And that's part of the fun.  Everyone is playing from the perspective of their characters and the fiction... it's emotional and visceral and not academic or intellectual at all -- in part because the Player have the freedom to make any choice they want for their PCs out of the fiction as defined up to that point.

So, before I go any further, do you have questions about playing this way?  Is this something you can see working?  Does it interest you?  Why or why not?

JB wrote: Since you don't have any nar games to refer to yet, consider this extremely rough and overly specific example.

Imagine a game where Mal's player gets Points!* for 'looking out for his' and acting so they don't come to harm.  And the player gets to choose NPCs who are 'his' - they go on a list on the character sheet.  But if one of the characters on that list does come to harm, or the player wants to take someone off the list, then Mal's player looses Points!

Ah, Martijn, you keep doing this thing, and the thing is this: Someone says, "Blah, blah, blah..." and you say, "That's all Story Now is?"

I don't know why you do this, but I can only say I never said that's what Story Now is.  I said it's a part of it.

If you've done it before, that's great.

I have a feeling there's not much more for me to offer here since what I have to offer isn't what I think you want, but I wanted to clarify a few things:

- I'm not sure what you mean by campaign in terms of length, but I know that I and others have played games for months and months.  I honestly don't see why it couldn't go longer.

- There's no reason for characters not to be a cohesive unit.  It's a choice on the part of the Players.  But the choice has to be there.  When you write, "The thing is, when you do that, the characters will soon each go their separate ways, and there won't be much game left. Either there needs to be a compelling reason for the characters to be together, or you need to game it so that they stay together even if the characters by their own free choice wouldn't have done so," I can safely reply: No, this isn't true.  This is flat out wrong.  I -- and many others -- have played many long terms sessions that worked very well this way.  You may not have and you may not see how.  But it can be done, with a great deal of fun and enthusiasm from everyone at the table.

- The characters often split up, but I use lots of cross-cutting between scenes as a GM, shifting from one PC to the next.  Because of the games I use and the techniques I use, everyone is engaged with what's going on, because what's happening to one player's PC is of interest to every other Player.

- I feel compelled to point out that my Players -- whether at conventions or my regular group -- all have a great time in these games.  No one feels left out.  This is only my data set and my say-so, but the reason I brought this up is that most folks assume this kind of play can't work, leaves folks being bored, or works - but only infrequently.  But it's part of larger package that really helps it work in terms of rules, procedures and techniques.

- The reason I brought this up was because I was thinking of typing up a version of Firefly using the rules for Sorcerer.  But Sorcerer assumes that the PCs can go their own way, and might even come to blows.  A lot of how the game works simply doesn't make sense if players don't see this as a functional option.  And since a lot of folks don't see it as an effective or fun or functional means of play, I just needed to see where you stood on this stuff.  You don't see the appeal, and that's cool.

I just went and read the thread you linked to.  I can only say that last night I GM'd Sorcerer for my group and it was a very intense session for everyone at the table.  

But there was lots of laughing and cheering and clapping of hands of approval.  

I'm saying that different games have different rules and procedures that produce wildly different results from similar sorts of play.  When my gang heads out after a Sorcerer session, all we're doing is talking about how we want to get back together again and play more.  I certainly sounds that, on the social level of just between folks, we're getting a different result than what you got at your session.  (And, I offer again, the games go on for several months.  And I could continue them, but the imagination of the Players keep coming up with new settings for Sorcerer.)

To answer some of your questions: "So the characters have a common history. They've already been designed to have something in common. They work together, take missions together, etc. But what will the captain do when he finds out the others have disobeyed a direct order? Will he kick them off his ship? Can he afford to do so? How much freedom does he really have? Are there really no expectations as to how he should act?"

- I have no idea what the Captain will do.  But he could choose to take any action he wanted.

- He might kick them off the ship.  He might not.  By the time the bomb is revealed, the Captain might be the one eager to use it and the two other PCs might have changed their minds, wishing they'd never brought the thing on board.

- He can afford to do so... but if does this (and he might not! -- it might never come to anything like this!) the crew might mutiny.  We won't know till a choice is actually made.

- He has all the freedom he wants.

- There are expectations built on the details of his character sheet only to the degree that his choices will most likely "orbit" the details on the sheet -- but they do not dictate choices.  At all.  For example is a reluctant noble with  complicated relationships with his father (the Duke of a subsector) mother, uncle and aunt.  This will inform his choices.  But dictates nothing.  There are many details on the PC's sheet like this.

Here's detail from the sheet:

Sorcerer also has a Humanity rating on a scale of 0 to 10.  The rating itself does nothing to "control" or dictate behavior, but if a PC's Humanity reaches 0, the Player loses the PC (he is not longer human!)  In each game of Sorcerer the group customizes the definition of Humanity.  For our Traveller setting game, the definition is Friendship.  So the choices, the big choices, orbit the choices of Friendship against Alienation.  You make rolls when your PC commits acts that either support or deny friendship, and your Humanity might go up or down because of that.  

Now, clearly, if a PC keeps acting against his friends it will drive his Humanity to 0 and he's out of the game!  But it's important to realize that a Player can do exactly that.  That's a choice for the Player alone.  In my first game of Sorcerer I drove my PC's Humanity to 0 and it was a blast.  He was a bitter, angry man driven by horrible passions and did the wrong thing time and again... and then (using rules from the game) we re-wrote him and I got him back as a PC and he travelled a path of redemption.  It was awesome.

So, there are imaginative "constraints" on the PCs (the fiction, the rules that tie to the fiction) but there are no expectations.  At all.

And I need to repeat one final time: it works great.  There's no anger at the table.  Everyone has a great time.  The sessions are compelling.  The games don't dry up or blow up.  Everyone can't wait to continue the stories to the next session.

Hi Martijn,

You may very well have been doing nar sessions already. Nar isn't supposed to be complicated.

If I read a text on the chemistry of breathing, yet it never mentioned the word 'breathe', I probably wouldn't associate all that chemistry talk with something I do naturally, all the time. You might be the same with the nar essays and such. It might be so over explained you can't connect it with something you already do. But if you want to get into the 'chemistry' of nar latter on, there's some texts for it.

I think there are some structures built into traditional rpgs which may seem obvious or necessary but which may not be, and that's at least part of the communication issue, because these other, less traditional ideas can pop the top on them.  I'm going to try to avoid jargon, to make my point.

In D&D, there's a basic structure to a game, which has been there from the beginning.  The players have characters.  Those characters are on a team.  Their goal (broadly) is to go up against bad guys, kill them, and get stuff.  The DM creates bad guys, and rewards the players for beating them.  Success is measured in survival and growth of power.  This is basically the template for most RPGs that follow.

None of it is required, but if you get rid of much of it, you end up playing a potentially very different game.  Even moving to Call of Cthulhu is very hard for a lot of people because playing the game probably means "failure" in the survival and growth of power realms.  Taking away accumulation of stuff can even be difficult for a lot of players.  Now, gathering stuff, going up levels, etc... that has little or nothing to do with "story", but it's pretty hardwired into a lot of roleplaying experience.  Losing all your stuff, being thrown in prison, having your trigger finger cut off so your sharpshooter can't shoot your gun any more... those are legit story elements which might destroy many players' enjoyment of a game too much to continue.

I bring that up because there's a huge difference between what's held up here as the goal of roleplaying here and what a lot of people "want" out of roleplaying.  That said, many don't know what the choices might be.

I do think it's important for something needs to bring the people at the table together, at some level, so they're clearly doing something connected.  In boardgames, for example, it's more interesting if your "move" can effect what happens to someone else's game than if you are all effectively playing Solitaire at the same table.  If you have 4 characters who are on completely unrelated adventures, that's kibbitzing at 3 solo rpgs, and having a DM who is only occasionally paying attention to you.  If you play a game centered around flying from place to place on a spaceship having adventures, and you "let" each player go to a different planet, and deal with unrelated stories, that's more or less what you're doing.  A "game" about Inara being a Companion in the Core, Mal making a deal on a space station, and Jayne on a bar crawl on a backwater planet would be hard to tie together.  Add Zoe hunting for Wash (who didn't show up for the session) on a pleasure planet, and you've got a total lack of focus, probably.

On the other hand, that *might* make a decent game, if there was a common thread to it all of some kind.  The players would slowly see the big picture, and because the characters were all nibbling around a common issue, it theoretically could start to grow into one big story with four or five "subplots", each of which was, itself, an interesting story.  Maybe Inara is enticed to travel to the backwater planet by the executive in charge of making an army of super-Wash-soldiers, and Mal is hired to smuggle dinosaurs there or something.  Not that this is true to the characters of the Firefly story.  The point is that you do need something tying the stories together, but it doesn't need to be "team play".

Alright, enough rambling for one post... the point is that there's a lot of hidden structure to most roleplaying group play.  I am excited to see that a lot of it is optional.  The assumption that you can just add a rule or two to "drift" a game without examining that structure, I think, is false.

Dr Pete

Hi Pete,

Exactly.  The idea that one one can band-aid up a couple of new rules is probably going to fall flat on its face.  There will be *many* new assumptions, tools and procedures for different kinds of games.  Notions about thematic mechanics or whether or not there will be a "party" are just pieces of a re-wired whole.  Some people, like me, wanted something different enough that learning to chuck whole sets of assumptions was worth it.  For others, not so much.

Such play is a very different game.  This is why, as an example, Sorcerer works even though it jettisons many, many assumptions about how a GM preps a game and how the Players approach the game.  But it replaces them with a new set of gears and levers and interlocking regulators that are well thought and can produce great, fun play.  (Other games do this effectively as well.  I'm discussing Sorcerer because it's fresh in my mind right now, but game like In a Wicked Age, Primetime Adventures, and HeroQuest all games I've loved playing but are startlingly different in play and mechanics than many folks are used to.  There are lots of other cool games I haven't even had a chance to play yet that I know I would love that also unique to themselves as to how to play them.)

Last year I ran a game of Sorcerer my player and I called THE BROTHERHOOD.  It was set in a prison.  There was a prison, Landsfied, where the prisoners were doing sorcerous lore.  The demons were tattoos and shivs and cell blocks.  One PC was a father who was seeking vengeance on the cult leader who was housed in the prison.  Another was an cop-killing ex-cop who had just been betrayed by a member of his crew and needed to find out who did it.  The third was a lifer who discovered that his nephew had arrived in the prison and was part of a plan to seize control of the cell block the PC ruled.

There was no team: but there were many elements that bound the PLAYERS together.  (Not the characters, the Players -- and this is a vital point that was a lightning bolt to me when I realized it years ago.)  In THE BROTHERHOOD, the Players were bound by the definition of Humanity (treating others well, playing outside the rules of "the system"), the definition of Lore (rituals of domination and abuse), the backstory I had prepared about the history of the prison, the turf war taking place in the prison.  Every PLAYER paid attention to what was happening with every other Player because they were curious about a) what choices the Players would be making morally, and b) information gleaned from by one Player's character often piqued the interest of another player even if his character hadn't been in the scene.

The game worked great.  Alliances were made between the PCs -- even though they had never known each other before -- bonds of trust were built in game.  It was really intense and sometimes moving and really quite compelling.  The Players had a great time.  (Please note, despite all fears that Players without "party" enforcement will always fly off to different corners of the world, I have never found this to be the case.  PLAYERS want to go where the interesting stuff is.  If the GM preps correctly, the Players will moved toward each other because they are all near interesting stuff.)

Setting up a Firefly game, the kind of Firefly game I would want to play, means working with lots of rules and tools that might seem not to work -- and if used individually probably would not.  But by using rules and tools designed to interact with each other effectively, produce terrific sessions of game play.  Many of the fears of such rules and tools vanish in actual play because the nightmare behaviors of the Players fail to arrive, or the behavior is transmuted into something effective and quite enjoyable.  (For example, lack of party play does not produce boredom or indifference form other players, but it also allows an amazing, hot interest in what the other Players will have their characters do, because we don't know what the character will do.  Any choice in the moral arena is available.

Now, some people want this kind of choice in their game play, some don't.  But when I watch shows (for example) like Lost, Firefly, The Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica I know I want that kind of electric decision making at my table.  And with the proper rules and tools such play does not produce fights, boredom, obstructive behavior, confusion or frustration.  Instead, the specific rules and tools used in a cohesive combination produces great, compelling play.

I understand people have horror stories about games that were "like" what I'm talking about.  I can only say I haven't had a horror story from a game session in the years I first started picking up the games I read about on The Forge.

Hi Christopher,

While I haven't played Sorcerer at this point, I'm definitely interested in giving it a try at some point.  I've read some of the stuff you've put up here and elsewhere, as well as many of Ron's comments.  Very interesting stuff!

I've had various bad experiences over the years with games where everyone makes a character and then we assume they're a "party" (especially bad for modern games-- a cat burglar, a 10 year old and a socialite team up to fight ghosts, etc) so I am all too familiar with how that can go wrong.

Sorcerer discussion seems to take two different tacks... talking about mechanics and talking about how games are structured.  In talking about drifting Serenity, one would presumably keep most of those mechanics, and would probably want to keep "true" at some level to the Firefly story structure, I would think... otherwise, why put it there rather than some other sci fi universe?

Firefly is a Space Western, of course.  Westerns are mostly about civilization vs lawlessness, and being on the edge of civilization.  They're about things like the lone gunslinger riding into town, fighting the bandits or indians.  About maintaining your moral code when nobody else cares.  My suspicion is that you are interested in the "loyalty" element, Christopher, but that's just one element of the cowboy code at play in western movies.  To use a Sorcerer-ish metaphor, Mal would risk losing a "humanity" if he didn't give the money back on that job he refused for going against his sense of right and wrong, I think.  The point being that if you want to craft stories, you need to decide what they should be about rather than "just" having adventures...

As far as mechanics tweaks, I don't know the Serenity mechanics, so I dunno.  One idea that springs to mind might be using Riddle of Steel spiritual attributes to replace plot points.  Basically, you have attributes like a moral code, faith and passions.  Your rating in these go up if you act on them at some risk, and they give bonuses based on their ratings... themed plot points, if I understand Serenity's mechanics based on a quick google search.  I'd also add that acting against them penalizes them, either by zeroing them out or by reducing them gradually.  It provides an in-game carrot for certain types of behavior, but also provides hooks for presenting hard choices for the character sheet... Loyalty or Revenge... do I pursue my revenge, worth 10 points on my sheet, or protect the innocent, worth 4 points on my sheet?  If I go with revenge, at the cost of innocent lives, I lose the 4 points, but if I go with save the innocent, I'm letting the object of my vengeance go, and I lose the 10 (or maybe it drops to 9...)!  That's just an idea, to bring it back to a mechanical "drift" question.

Pete

mcv wrote: to stay together.

Have you read what I wrote in another thread about a particularly dramatic session with mismatched characters? It was memorable, but maybe a bit too intense, and not a lot of fun for the player who got completely overshadowed by the escalating conflict between the other characters.

Hi guys,

Caldis, that's a good point.  One thing I want to add, though, as I stated two posts ago, is that simply having characters in conflict is not Story Now, even if it's justified with "My Guy Would Do This..."

I have no idea what, exactly was going on at your table, Caldis, nor Martijn's in his example.  I just want to be really clear that inter-character conflict is NOT the definition of Story Now.  I've played several games where that never even happened.

My only point earlier was to make clear that there was no "party" to speak of since the Players had to have the freedom to have their PCs do anything.  The assumption of the "party" short circuits that.

Hi all,

I just (finally) finished posting the Actual Play summary of a HeroQuest game I GM'd at local convention a year ago.

The setting was Glorantha.  But used many of the procedures and gameplay I've been talking about in this thread onto the game.  (Basically I took procedures from Sorcerer and mapped them onto HeroQuest play.)

I'm linking here because I think the thread successfully illustrates many of the points I've been talking about in this thread. 

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=25796.0

Fair Warning: It's a pretty complete write up, with lots of notes about GM prepping, Kickers, Bangs and other items I really wanted to talk about.  So.  Um.  It's about twenty or so pages of single spaced material if you were to print it all out.

Just so you know.

Christopher, that was a great description of your game.

Maybe there's more that can be discussed about bringing the idea to a Space Western (or even a generic) game, preferably in a system-independent way, or looking at what, system-wise, is needed/can be used to bring out "story".

What are the various tools that have been developed for this, in other words...? 

One "problem" with kickers in the abstract is that they can lead to very independent play.  Each person has their own ideas, things that interest them, etc.  This might produce something like Battlestar Galactica, where everyone is off facing their own personal crisis.  On Firefly, the characters are more closely tied together... they are all on a ship, they are more or less a team, though one with various tensions between characters.

To create a firefly-like story, you want everyone to buy into being part of that at some level, I think.  There are characters facing some external challenge together, while also dealing with individual issues.  Your HeroQuest writeup points to the question I'm getting at, in a way... there, the characters were explicitly set up to be family, which brings a lot of structure to the story.  If you have adults working together, how do produce some of that same cohesion, or do you just hope it comes naturally?

In Firefly, it's a business... admittedly a pretty mediocre one.  Mal owns a ship.  He's hired Wash to pilot it, and Kaylee to keep it running.  He's hired Zoe and Jayne to be muscle for whatever they're doing.  Simon is hired on as a medic, and gets to keep his sister on board.  Book and Inara are paying passengers willing to be taken wherever the ship is going.  I think it's easy to think of them as a bunch of people having adventures, but they're not just people that met in a tavern and teamed up, there's some structure there-- it pulls them together, and generates stories.  On the other hand, somebody can get fired or quit or act in a way that's not in the best interest of the company they work for, it's a legit choice in a way that "no, I don't want to crawl into that bear cave with you, stranger" is usually not a legit choice in D&D.

I guess the flip side of that is, what do you do with kickers if everyone's working/living on a ship and they're at least moderately committed to staying together (because it's their job/their family)?  Is there an implicit "we're going to riff off of each other" thing that goes on, or is that explicit in some way?  How would generating one collaborative "group kicker" for the "A story" mesh with having each individual generating a personal kicker (which may or may not be connected to the group one)?  I'm not sure how exactly this would play out, and maybe I'm confusing kickers with something more like plot elements... "the ship's low on gas" or "we've got a hold full of stolen goods"

Mal discovers he's married certainly seems like a kicker, but how might a train robbery, say, come into play with this game structure?  The "traditional" way to do this would be to have somebody give the players a mission... get me such and such off this guarded train.  That doesn't seem compatible with this play style, or is it?  Big set pieces where "action" takes place seem discouraged, no?

Hi Pete,

This could get huge and messy fast.  And I'm planning a post where we actually break out a sample version of FIREFLY using Sorcerer and and then HeroQuest.

But before we get there, in the hope of trying to avoid big and messy, I'm going to try to keep it small and neat for now.  It's my belief we can succeed at this.

So, you're working with many assumptions in that last post (we make sense, we're discussing something that doesn't exist yet and hasn't happened yet, so we're only working with assumptions) and I want to poke at two of them.  Think about them -- for a while -- and see what you come back with.

1) You seems to be assuming that the three PCs in the Glorantha game stayed together because of the family structure.  My question is, why do you assume this?  You do see that after Daleeta vanished and the father said he was going after her, the younger son might have tried to force his father to stay and let the girl go.  Right?  There was already bad blood between the two of them and this would have been very understandable.  If the Players had made different choices then we might have ended up with a fight in the village with father and son.  The second son would have been forced to make a decision about what to do.  it could have ended up very blood and violent and with a very different end to the session.

Do you see that the Players had utter free will and decided that the crisis of Daleeta's disappearance strengthened the bonds between them, but that it didn't have to go that way?

There was NO structure that reinforced them working together as a group.  None.  None at all.  It was simply the choices of the Players.

Do you see this?

2) You wrote, in the context of using Kickers in a Firefly game:

"Each person has their own ideas, things that interest them, etc.  On Firefly, the characters are more closely tied together... they are all on a ship, they are more or less a team, though one with various tensions between characters.  To create a firefly-like story, you want everyone to buy into being part of that at some level."

Okay.  Yes.  I'm assuming that if the Players all want to play a game "like" FIREFLY, they will, in fact want to remain together as a crew.  That is, it "interests" them to do this.  They have "bought into being part of that" because we are doing exactly that thing.

For some reason you are assuming that a Kicker would override a Player's own "interests" -- the interest to play the crew of a star faring tramp freighter.  But, do you see that no Kicker forces no Player to do anything other than what interests them?  What interests the Player is the point of this kind of play.  And if the Players keep wanting to be shipmates then they will.  How does having Kickers distort this?

2a) Because I think you're making some unique distinctions about FIREFLY, let me offer this:

River has a Kicker: She wakes up in the cargo hold of a tramp freighter, no knowing anyone but her brother.
Simon has a Kicker: He just busted his sister out of a secret and dangerous "school" that conducts mind-altering experiments.
Jayne has a Kicker: An Alliance Federal Agent just offered him a big reward for betraying Mal.
Mal has a Kicker: He just lost the big payment he needed to keep his ship going
Booker has a Kicker: He just witnessed a murder

And so on...

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.... These Kickers are all taken from the two hour pilot.  They will inform the series for the run of the show. And they are THERE.  Right there in the show.  Because the show is made of story stuff, and the game play we're talking about is made of story stuff.

Keep in mind that Jayne BETRAYS the crew for more money in one episode.  Keep in mind that Mal almost kills Jayne for this betrayal.

You might say, "Yes, but of course it will all work out.  They're a team!"

And I would say, "And it can work out in an RPG with Players having utter free will as well, since the Players can choose to have their PCs remain as a remain a team."

Do you see that this is all up to the Players?  The Kickers force nothing.  They do not make the Players pull apart from each other.

If we were in Alternate Reality RPG-Land and there had never been a FIREFLY series and we were playing out the game of Firefly and Jayne's Player made the play for the betrayal at the hospital that would be his choice.  Because it interested him to pursue this.  And we'd see how it played out.  He might end up dead.  Mal might end up killing him.  He might end up killing Mal. Or they might end up making up... just like what happened on the TV show.  But it would be based on what the Players were interested in, not arbitrary expectations front-loaded before play.

So, those are two and a half things to consider.  Consider them.  And really, take a day or two and think about them.  And then, no matter how they sit, come back and we'll talk more.

I'm slammed with projects right now, so taking some time would be good for me.

whoops!

One more thing:

Make sure to watch the FIREFLY Pilot.  If you don't have it, you can catch it here on Hulu.com http://www.hulu.com/watch/4569/firefly-serenity

Watch it in the context of this conversation... Which is to say, watch it with an eye to the choices the characters make.

****
Oh, and I've reconsidered my write up of Mal's Kicker to make it a bit punchier (I wrote them on the fly, after all...)

Mal has a Kicker: "A criminal refuses to complete a bargain for stolen goods when I desperately need the money." 

This would be translated into a specific scene in an RPG, a scene that provokes a choice from Mal because of how the GM frames it.  In fact, in the actual episode, it ends up provoking choices from Mal, Zoe and Jayne.  Watch the pilot and see how the engine that drives it is the choices the characters make.

I'm a bit behind in reading and responding to messages here. I've seen some interesting points in other messages that I also want to respond to, but this particular one deals directly with an issue I'm struggling with:

Christopher wrote:
Ah, Martijn, you keep doing this thing, and the thing is this: Someone says, "Blah, blah, blah..." and you say, "That's all Story Now is?"

- I'm not sure what you mean by campaign in terms of length, but I know that I and others have played games for months and months.  I honestly don't see why it couldn't go longer.

- There's no reason for characters not to be a cohesive unit.  It's a choice on the part of the Players.  But the choice has to be there.  When you write, "The thing is, when you do that, the characters will soon each go their separate ways, and there won't be much game left. Either there needs to be a compelling reason for the characters to be together, or you need to game it so that they stay together even if the characters by their own free choice wouldn't have done so," I can safely reply: No, this isn't true.  This is flat out wrong.  I -- and many others -- have played many long terms sessions that worked very well this way.  You may not have and you may not see how.  But it can be done, with a great deal of fun and enthusiasm from everyone at the table.

- The characters often split up, but I use lots of cross-cutting between scenes as a GM, shifting from one PC to the next.  Because of the games I use and the techniques I use, everyone is engaged with what's going on, because what's happening to one player's PC is of interest to every other Player.

Sorcerer also has a Humanity rating on a scale of 0 to 10.  The rating itself does nothing to "control" or dictate behavior, but if a PC's Humanity reaches 0, the Player loses the PC (he is not longer human!)  In each game of Sorcerer the group customizes the definition of Humanity.  For our Traveller setting game, the definition is Friendship.  So the choices, the big choices, orbit the choices of Friendship against Alienation.  You make rolls when your PC commits acts that either support or deny friendship, and your Humanity might go up or down because of that.

Now, clearly, if a PC keeps acting against his friends it will drive his Humanity to 0 and he's out of the game!  But it's important to realize that a Player can do exactly that.  That's a choice for the Player alone.  In my first game of Sorcerer I drove my PC's Humanity to 0 and it was a blast.  He was a bitter, angry man driven by horrible passions and did the wrong thing time and again... and then (using rules from the game) we re-wrote him and I got him back as a PC and he travelled a path of redemption.  It was awesome.

So, there are imaginative "constraints" on the PCs (the fiction, the rules that tie to the fiction) but there are no expectations.  At all.

And I need to repeat one final time: it works great.  There's no anger at the table.  Everyone has a great time.  The sessions are compelling.  The games don't dry up or blow up.  Everyone can't wait to continue the stories to the next session.

Hello Martijn,

You wrote something that I think is very accurate: "I hope it's not too annoying when I do that, but from my perspective, what people call "Story Now" constantly seems to jump between two extremes, one where it's a completely new way of playing, and another where it's pretty close to what I've been doing (or been trying) for most of my life."

Certainly that has been my experience with the tools and procedures I've been playing with the last several years.  The key, for me, is that the play works now.  I get what I wanted and it works.

I got what I wanted, and I got play that works.  I had to give up a lot of assumptions about what would work and what would not.  But when I did, I got what I wanted.

Did you get a chance to look at the HeroQuest thread I linked to?  I know it is long, but it is a clear example of these procedures.  Although it was a one shot at a convention, for me it could easily have served as the first session in a long series of sessions.  I do hope you get a chance to go through it.  It would give us a framework for discussion from actual play -- which is where I am always most comfortable.

Three more points in general:

1) In terms of campaigns, I can't speak to that perhaps the way you would like.  The desire for the long campaign isn't particularly my desire.  That is, I understand the desire.  I have the desire.  But mixed with the long campaign are issues of time commitment and structural issues in a game that sometimes bog down.

It sounds like your Earthdawn game has had about 150 to 200 sessions.  The Sorcerer game I played last year, the one set in prison, lasted 9 sessions -- not a years long play at all.  And yet the nine sessions were packed with amazing play and a great deal of fun.  We could also pick up those characters and play them again.  We could continue the stories -- or even move backward in time and tell a tale of who they were before that particular story took place.

My point is -- whether we did that or not -- is that my concern these days is the fun I have at the table right now.  I no longer press myself toward games that will still be running five years from now.  I'm content to focus on games that will reliably produce a great time now.  If that means I'm not counting on a game that's running five years from now, so be it.  Again, this doesn't mean I couldn't end up with a years-long running game.  I'm just saying that isn't my primary focus.  My primary focus is more fun now.

2) You wrote: "I prefer a game and game world that makes sense...I care about the realism, about complex, plausible characters that work realistically as protagonist of a story in that word."  Did you write this as a contrast to the sort of play I've been discussing?  I'm not sure why you would do this, but if you did, could you write me a few words about why this is? I don't think anything I've written about suggests that the world doesn't make sense or that the characters are not plausible.  Certainly, the kinds of sessions I play have worlds and characters as plausible as those found in the series Firefly!  Have I written anything to make you think otherwise?

3) As for the concept of "solo games" or "solo campaigns" -- I'm fascinated by these terms.  Now, I'm not trying to convince you of anything.  What I've been writing about may not be your cup of tea, and that's fine.  But I need you to understand that nothing I play like (in the HeroQuest game I linked to, in the Sorcerer games I've mentioned) feel "solo" at all. 

It's always a group of people gathered together.  Doing something socially.  Together.  We're all interested in what the other people are doing with their characters.  This, I'll be blunt, is just a major point of disconnect.  That you're focusing so much on what interests the characters seems utterly alien to me since I've learned that what really matters at the game table is what interests the Players.  There's just no getting around it. 

If the PCs work together as a group it's because the Players decide to do it.  No amount of fiction constraints ("You're all a squad from the FBI") can force that to happen.  In my experience it is fictional constraints like this that almost encourage Players to strike out on their own.  Feeling trapped in a game makes people test the boundaries as they search for some freedom.  Frustration arises and then the Players (not the PCs!) are getting in each other's faces.

For you, the notion that the PCs are not in the same scene is some sort of solo play.  But I realized a while back that no matter what, only one person can talk at a time, only one person can do something at a time. So if I stretch that 10 to 30 seconds of play a little longer to one to three minutes of play, and cut quickly around the table from one player to the next, there's little risk of boredom for the players and the players get to do more. 

But, I say again, there's no solo play.  My focus is on the social group of the Players at the table.  And the games I play, and the prep I do as a GM, is about insuring that the Players are involved and interested in what's happening at the table even if their character is in a scene.  I suspect you don't believe me -- but this goes back to point one above: the game play does involve new techniques and procedures that change the way play goes, even if it is only to get the kind of play you've already done or have striving to play.  The results are different.

I simply see nothing "solo" about the play at my table, and I know my Players would agree. But the games I play offer new ways of building cohesion among the social group at the table and wind everything up in ways that might not be part of how you're seeing play work.

A quick note about the Humanity rule from Sorcerer: To be very clear, the rules does not constrain the Player's choices.... it is that there are consequences for those choices.  Essentially, when you do something "against" Humanity, you have a 50% chance of the PC's Humanity going down a point.  When the PC does something in line with Humanity, there is about a 50% chance the Humanity will go up a point.  So the Player can behave any way he wants...  he can even dance on the edge of Humanity 0 for while with a Humanity of 1 and doing against-Humanity things as long as the dice favor him.  But it is the Player's choice, every time.  And if the Player really believes his character would act in a way that threatens his Humanity, he's allowed to drive it down toward 0.  And then, if the player decides the risk is getting too great, he can pull back and start doing actions to lift his Humanity.  But the point of the mechanic is that the Player chooses -- there is no forcing of behavior.

Christopher wrote: You wrote something that I think is very accurate: "I hope it's not too annoying when I do that, but from my perspective, what people call "Story Now" constantly seems to jump between two extremes, one where it's a completely new way of playing, and another where it's pretty close to what I've been doing (or been trying) for most of my life."

Certainly that has been my experience with the tools and procedures I've been playing with the last several years.  The key, for me, is that the play works now.  I get what I wanted and it works.

I got what I wanted, and I got play that works.  I had to give up a lot of assumptions about what would work and what would not.  But when I did, I got what I wanted.

Did you get a chance to look at the HeroQuest thread I linked to?  I know it is long, but it is a clear example of these procedures.  Although it was a one shot at a convention, for me it could easily have served as the first session in a long series of sessions.  I do hope you get a chance to go through it.  It would give us a framework for discussion from actual play -- which is where I am always most comfortable.

2) You wrote: "I prefer a game and game world that makes sense...I care about the realism, about complex, plausible characters that work realistically as protagonist of a story in that word."  Did you write this as a contrast to the sort of play I've been discussing?

3) As for the concept of "solo games" or "solo campaigns" -- I'm fascinated by these terms.  Now, I'm not trying to convince you of anything.  What I've been writing about may not be your cup of tea, and that's fine.  But I need you to understand that nothing I play like (in the HeroQuest game I linked to, in the Sorcerer games I've mentioned) feel "solo" at all. 

It's always a group of people gathered together.  Doing something socially.  Together.  We're all interested in what the other people are doing with their characters.  This, I'll be blunt, is just a major point of disconnect.  That you're focusing so much on what interests the characters seems utterly alien to me since I've learned that what really matters at the game table is what interests the Players.  There's just no getting around it.

If the PCs work together as a group it's because the Players decide to do it.

No amount of fiction constraints ("You're all a squad from the FBI") can force that to happen.  In my experience it is fictional constraints like this that almost encourage Players to strike out on their own.

For you, the notion that the PCs are not in the same scene is some sort of solo play.

I simply see nothing "solo" about the play at my table, and I know my Players would agree. But the games I play offer new ways of building cohesion among the social group at the table and wind everything up in ways that might not be part of how you're seeing play work.

A quick note about the Humanity rule from Sorcerer: To be very clear, the rules does not constrain the Player's choices.... it is that there are consequences for those choices.  Essentially, when you do something "against" Humanity, you have a 50% chance of the PC's Humanity going down a point.  When the PC does something in line with Humanity, there is about a 50% chance the Humanity will go up a point.  So the Player can behave any way he wants...  he can even dance on the edge of Humanity 0 for while with a Humanity of 1 and doing against-Humanity things as long as the dice favor him.  But it is the Player's choice, every time.  And if the Player really believes his character would act in a way that threatens his Humanity, he's allowed to drive it down toward 0.  And then, if the player decides the risk is getting too great, he can pull back and start doing actions to lift his Humanity.  But the point of the mechanic is that the Player chooses -- there is no forcing of behavior.

Hi Martijn,

I'm slammed on some writing right now, so I wont' get back to this for a while.  Luckily, that will give you time for the two length threads at hand.  I really think moving forward in our conversation will be helped by this, giving us some shared context to poke at.

I did want to say, though, that this made me laugh (a true, honest laugh of recognition):

"Haven't read all of it yet. There's a lot of stuff in this thread I still need to read and digest. But it still sounds somewhat like an accident: somehow everybody just got it, and started doing your work for you."

Yes!  I know!  It does seem that way!  And if I didn't get the same, reliable results with different Players I'd think the same thing.

We'll talk more about the specifics later.  But take a look at what is already written. Notice that the the Players in the HeroQuest game were also very interested in what interested the characters.  But without the Players first there are no characters.  That's my only point.  When I write something like that it is not at the expense of playing from the point of view of characters and their emotions and drives and passions -- but it is an acknowledgement of the reality of what happens when real life people sit down to play together.  Hoping that things will work out because the Players will "hide" themselves in their characters is, I have found, an expectation that often leads to disappointment.

But I'm already typing too much... we'll take a couple of days and reconvene. 

Hi Martijn, (Christopher, I'll give you a rest, lol)

It sounds like we're discussing very similar issues regarding setting up the game so that it has some cohesion.

My feeling is that yes, there should be something that binds the characters together.  There are at least 2 different types of ties I can think of that could work... family and employment bonds.  Others might also work.

I think that an important element of this is a collaborative character creation process.  How are the characters connected to each other?  Starblazer Adventures (based on FATE/SotC) requires players to construct backstory links between the characters as part of the generation process, which might be helpful, though I sense one might want to go a bit further than they do by default.  It's a very cool, fairly generic-setting space game which would probably be easy to play in a narrativist way.

I've been told that a very big part of this kind of play is to not constrain the players control over the action of their characters.  Lets imagine for a moment that we're talking about the example you mentioned.  One character doing courtly intrigue, one slaying dragons, one is tending his herd and fighting off raiders, and one is exploring some far away land.  This is the same type of thing I was worried about, but lets go back 1-2 sessions of this theoretical game, and think about how they might have gotten here playing this the "Story Now" way.

The characters, lets imagine, are created as four brothers, all minor landed nobles.  They are in a nation on the brink of war with a far away country. 
The first one's kicker: While at court, I overheard a plot against the king. 
The second one's kicker: I learn that a dragon killed our father.
The third one's kicker: Bandits have raided my land.
The fourth one's kicker: My son has been taken hostage.

Just by trying to do this, I've turned these into somewhat more interesting individual stories.  The actions of the theoretical characters are totally bland without some meat as to motivation.  You need a reason to "do intrigue" and "farming" has to be among the dullest rp activities... maybe not "roll to paint the wall without dripping" boring, but that's not a game, that's a character sketch.  "I plow today"... "ok, roll to see if you hit a rock... ah, a 1, you nick your plowblade"

Now, lets move the game forward a bit...

Maybe the travelling one's son was taken hostage by the king, as insurance.  The King wants to send him on a Ambassadorial mission to their enemy nation-- both to gather information, and to keep him away from Belinda.  Maybe he's out there working in good faith for the King, maybe he's trying to cement his own power for his comeback.

The first son's intrigue might grow into to seducing/protecting Belinda, as well as fighting over issues of inheritance, since the father is dead.  All this while trying to find the enemy agent in court.  Maybe he even instigated the exile?

Meanwhile, perhaps the dragon is allied with the kingdom, and sworn to protect it from invasion.  Killing it would leave the country in a much worse position to defend itself.  On the other hand, maybe it has magical treasure which would be useful.  Combat, in and of itself, serves little narrative purpose.  He's not going to go up a level, or get rich from it, so why's he off doing it?  Some story related reason.  Heck, maybe the dragon will offer to place him on the throne, once he sees he's outgunned.

The bandits are scouting parties for the imminent invasion, and the third one is therefore on the front lines of the war that's about to start.  His serfs are in need of leadership, and he is in need of backup, but someone has convinced the king not to send him any assistance.

These four guys are in totally different places, but I could see each of the players being genuinely interested in what happened to the others, because the stories are compelling (at least moderately, given that I had to back engineer them), and they are intertwined.  The things they are doing are not supposed to be the generic, everyday stuff... clearing dungeons, wandering aimlessly hoping something will attack you.  No, you leap straight to the cool bits that put the characters under story pressure... the story is the stuff you want from it, not the xp grinding.

Hi Guys,

No big post this time.  Again, I'm thinking something through, but haven't written it yet.

But I really liked this: "No, you leap straight to the cool bits that put the characters under story pressure... the story is the stuff you want from it."  Exactly!  That's the practical effect.

I also want to point you to some threads from a while back.  Ron Edwards and three other posters did character creation and scenario background prep for a Sorcerer game online.  It wasn't for an actual game -- simply a walk through of how setting, situation, Kickers and so forth all come together.  You might want to check them out.

"To Tor, Jesse and Paul" http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=753.0
Art Deco Melodrama http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=770.0
Art Deco Melodrama Part 2 http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=828.0
Art Deco Melodrama The Final Chapter http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=876.0

And while I'm at it...

Here are the links to the AP of a Sorcerer game run by Jesse Berneko (it's the game I referenced, where I drove my PC's Humanity to 0)

Gothic Fantasy Part One:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=2702.0

Gothic Fantasy Part Two:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=2807.msg27442#msg27442

Gothic Fantasy Part Three:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=2908.msg28210#msg28210

Enjoy!

There's a couple of things I want to chime in on.  In summary, many role players are trained to expect certain things, or think about things certain ways.  It took me a long time to see that C.Agenda wasn't just an axis between Role and Roll, but actually had three points of Step Up, Dream, and StoryNow! (*)

1. I had an idea, when I started, that Story Now! was somehow light on GM Work, since I didn't need to worry about charts of weapon comparisons (that helped players Share the Dream), or complex Skill trees (to determine if my players Stepped Up to the Challenge).
  This was SOOO Wrong. 
There are plenty of work for a GM in StoryNow, and a lot of it is what I think would fall under "Discussion of mechanics, with Low Immersion" for the players.
The longer the campaign is set to go, the more a GM needs work to make sure all his players are feeling like Protagonists, and aren't being overwhelmed by the free choice to direct the story.  It's more cerebral, "fiddly" work, and less about making sure that all the NPCs have unique funny voices. 

2. Because a StoryNow campaign is often more open-ended by design, sometimes players feel 'lost,' and lose interest.  It's important to add shorter campaign "tales," or episodic elements, so that players can see milestones.  In Shared Dream play, keeping things going without end is a goal in itself.  In Gamist play, there's usually levels and XP and things like that to worry about.  In Narr play, oftentimes the campaign end after 6-10 sessions.  It's not because the story is played out, but because the players are preconditioned to expect XP and to increases in effectiveness, and some StoryNow games don't have that.

3. In StoryNow Games, ESPECIALLY a game based on Firefly where there is a specific feel and style that you're trying to reproduce, players should talk out loud, to each other, while building the characters.  It's important that characters are built with motivations and goals that aren't designed to crash into each other.  OR, if they are built that way, that the players know that they have motivations that might conflict, and they're ready and expecting that. In some systems, players can design their characters without talking, and still get functional play.  Most Nar games aren't like that (although there are exceptions)

4. Why some people say StoryNow! games are like StepUp games: In Gamist and Narr games, players need to spend a certain amount of thought on what game mechanics they're going to use.  If the whole session passes and there's no dice rolling (or other Conflict Resolution), then the scenes are usually flat and unsuccessful.  Either characters are not pushing the Premise, or not Stepping up to Challenges.  In Simulationist games, the rules are there to facilitate the Dream, and if players spend three sessions without ever creating a Conflict, all Exploring Character and Setting, they might call that a successful play.

5. In most StoryNow play, the only limit as to how deep the player can address the Premise is based on how much they want to, from day one.  Increases in Effectiveness usually only increases how much the story goes your way As Opposed to the Other Players.  This sometimes leads to a player vs player mentality, or player vs GM, where players feel like they've lost when the story doesn't go their way, instead of feeling like they've won by creating an interesting scene.  Creating a flat scene is how you lose at Narr, not by not getting your own way.

-Fred
(*) The NOW part of StoryNow is important, because a good story can emerge from Gamist or Sim play, but it isn't the focus (NOW!) of the players.

Hi Christopher,

I've given your points some thought...

On the first point, I think there's a major distinction that needs to be made that I do think I had in mind, but may not have communicated clearly.  That is, the distinction between the characters working together, and the game "working" as an actual group activity. 

I, at the moment, think that the characters need to be sufficiently bound together on some level that when Alan is "active", Betty has a reason to be tuned in, and not be just waiting for her turn.  The classic example of this is when somebody goes off alone, and the GM and player go into another room.  I don't think that hypothetical boredom of Betty's is because she's self-absorbed.  When groups split up, it often derails the momentum, because there's at least a sense that you're a spectator for extended periods.

A stereotypical character good for a lot of games is something like Boba Fett.  Mysterious, standoffish, tactically strong.  Watching someone play that character skulking around a bar and not talking to anyone is boring.  Heck, being in a long car ride with him would be boring.  A lot of characters are built for solo or tactical play, and watching somebody else play through combat is not usually a good gaming experience.  For these and various other reasons, you don't usually split up the group.

The questions is, how do you liven up the game from this model so that it remains a viable game for everyone even if the characters are in different places, and even if the characters are in conflict.  Obviously, it's possible, as various threads here have shown.  I think part of the success must come from the emphasis on constructing something more story-like, with dramatic tension.

But you have written, and Ron wrote in the Art Deco thread, about it being important that the characters be linked, at some level.  My sense is that that is important to increase the player's interest in what's happening at the table when they're not "on".  I don't think it's just an issue in Martijn's games.  Doing interesting things, things worthy of an audience, is the another part of that equation.  It may be that the frequency of cutting between different groups is higher, as well.  Are we talking, typically, about 2-3 minutes before moving on, 10-15 minutes, or something else?

As for character conflict, I would absolutely buy that characters can be at each others throats, even if family, etc.  If I played in a game like that, though, dealing with that conflict would probably take priority over a good chunk of the "adventure" though (obviously I'm approaching this discussion from the perspective of a game like D&D, with a GM generated plot, etc).  Those conflicts are traditionally very annoying because of metagame concerns that tend to take away options like having a real fight.  I think I mentioned a game I played many years ago where we had a thief stealing from other characters during a dungeon crawl... that's a violation of a usually unspoken social contract among players, even if the character class was thief.  A realistic reaction might be to kill him and leave him to rot in the dungeon, but that also seemed, at the time, like it would be wrong to do.  That said, I could totally see how a game with this other focus could be very cool and engaging.  I think it's very clearly NOT something to try to sneak into a traditional game with traditional expectations to try to bring the game to another level.

On point 2:
I see that if the players agree that they "want" to be tied together with some structure that they would be less inclined to create characters that would send them flying off in different directions, or ripping each others throats out.  I guess I was primarily thinking about the structure the people around the table come to in creating the characters.

There's a big difference between "create your own character, doing your own thing which interests you" which seems to characterize the Art Deco and the Gothic Fantasy game setups, and what happened in the HeroQuest game.  That was what I was driving at... what structure, if any, can/should the GM provide players as they set about doing character creation?  Traveler Sorcerer seems to say "you're all old war buddies" while in the HeroQuest game the players seem to have spontaneously decided to play a family.  Without some guidance before starting creation, do they typically form strong links, or start independent?  In my past play, I've done the "everyone create a character, and I'll figure out how to bring your characters together" setup.  It can work, but I see that it is only superficially similar.

And on 2b)
It's definitely true that those kickers are all there, and without the "tv show" constraint, Mal could have killed Jayne.  In fact, his name's escaping me, but the pilot of Buffy (another Whedon creation) featured the death of one of the original group of buddies which might otherwise have become the Scooby Gang, if I remember correctly.