Somehow I came across this thought while pondering Rons breakdown of classes - there is a link here somewhere with how character presage, bring about, their own actions as it were, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Can we do MacBeth in RPG?

I think of this as something of a challenge. Shakespears plays have been ported to just about every medium known; can RPG do it too? Discussing whether or not, or even trying to establish a method of play that would work, might be an interesting exercise. The plays that are likely best candidates are MacBeth, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet and possibly Othello. I hope that by exploring these works from an RPG perspective we might develop some insight into character definitions that "call out" to be resolved.

Firstly, what would be the experience of approaching such a well known work? Right there the IC/OOC issue has to be tackled, the very conception of how the game is played will need to incorporate that element. OTOH it pretty much resolves our premise issue, I think.

Second, the hackneyed old adventuring party is clearly innapropriate; something more relationship-oriented, probably with characters operating individually and opposed, would probably be better suited. Characters would have to be people of dramatic import - can this be abstracted to "role", or do we have to mandate actual PC's? What about numbers of characters/players?

Third, the issue of "railroading" seen from a new perspective. By comparison to the "wandering psychopath" mode, such a game would probably not be railroaded so much as bound and gagged. OTOH, if that is a component of our Premise, or at least our shared undertaking, and everybody understands that we are here to DO MacBeth, that should not be too big a deal. The question then becomes how to structure the game such that a sequence of events roughly equivalent to that of the play unfolds at the actual table.

This is a game that needs no objective stats, and may not even need much of a resolution system. It may be that such a game is not an RPG in the conventional sense of being a place and a method to play, but more like a murder mystery weekend in which the system is written around the specifics rather than the generics of the game. Specific conditions can be directly addressed; Thibault and Mercutio do not need "combat stats"; they only need to know which dramatically significant character "trumps" another should they enter conflict.

Perhaps characters are constructed, instead, as kinda precripted events; the fight between Mercutio and Thibault (IIRC) is "written on the stars" and manifest as a kinda short-term TROS-style Destiny. Possibly a mechanical method would be to in some way "count down" such a destiny, or a reward system established to prompt players to "realise" plot events through their actions.

Soliloquy would still be important; the non-speaking players are audience, and need OOC insight into the other characters state of mind (or more accurately in context, visibility of signposts indicative of the characters state of mind, which may well be mandated and/or event driven outside of the player).

I guess that you could say that my interest now is to see whether the deconstruction of class, in combination of what else we know about resolution methods, how and why system matters, allows us to reverse engineer a play into a a playable game. It may not be possible;p but it might be an interesting attempt.

I tmight interest you to know that I have been using Shakespeare a lot lately for relationship maps. And it works fabulously well. Take Romeo and Juliet (which I did not use as it's too obvious to everyone playing, but will work for an example). You have the two families, the Duke, etc, all put at odds by the love of two kids. Very powerful potential.

As a relationship map, players can run into this situation, become involved with some of the more important characters, perhaps help the lovers, perhaps thwart them, whatever. It's even more powerful as a storymap, ala Alyria, however where the players are part of the map from the start. Which is closer to what you're describing. In this case, you'll end up with something very Shakespearean, I'd think.

Will either methods give you Romeo & Juliet? Probably not. But then, I'm not sure that reproducing the play, even if just structurally, is a laudable goal. That's why we have the Stage, TV, Movies, etc. RPGs are about the improvisation. As such, it's possible to author your own story using similar characters, with similar conflicts. Which is very cool. Is it Shakespeare? No. But I think he'd approve. ;-)

Mike

Oh, BTW, Gareth:

Macbeth!

(now he has to do a series of silly chants and gestures to avoid bad luck; this is why it's referred to as the Scotish Play, at least according to Blackadder the Third)

Mike

contracycle wrote: Somehow I came across this thought while pondering Ron's breakdown of classes - there is a link here somewhere with how character presage, bring about, their own actions as it were, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Can we do MacBeth in RPG?

contracycle wrote: Firstly, what would be the experience of approaching such a well-known work? Right there the IC/OOC issue has to be tackled, the very conception of how the game is played will need to incorporate that element. OTOH it pretty much resolves our premise issue, I think.

contracycle wrote: Second, the hackneyed old adventuring party is clearly inappropriate; something more relationship-oriented, probably with characters operating individually and opposed, would probably be better suited. Characters would have to be people of dramatic import - can this be abstracted to "role", or do we have to mandate actual PC's? What about numbers of characters/players?

contracycle wrote: Third, the issue of "railroading" seen from a new perspective. By comparison to the "wandering psychopath" mode, such a game would probably not be railroaded so much as bound and gagged.

contracycle wrote: OTOH, if that is a component of our Premise, or at least our shared undertaking, and everybody understands that we are here to DO MacBeth, [then] that should not be too big a deal. The question then becomes how to structure the game such that a sequence of events roughly equivalent to that of the play unfolds at the actual table.

contracycle wrote: This is a game that needs no objective stats, and may not even need much of a resolution system. It may be that such a game is not an RPG in the conventional sense of being a place and a method to play, but more like a murder mystery weekend in which the system is written around the specifics rather than the generics of the game. Specific conditions can be directly addressed; Thibault and Mercutio do not need "combat stats"; they only need to know which dramatically significant character "trumps" another should they enter conflict.

contracycle wrote: Perhaps characters are constructed, instead, as kinda pre-scripted events; the fight between Mercutio and Thibault (IIRC) is "written on the stars" and manifest as a kinda short-term TROS-style Destiny. Possibly a mechanical method would be to in some way "count down" such a destiny, or a reward system established to prompt players to "realize" plot events through their actions.

contracycle wrote: Soliloquy would still be important;

contracycle wrote: I guess that you could say that my interest now is to see whether the deconstruction of class, in combination of what else we know about resolution methods, how and why system matters, allows us to reverse engineer a play into a playable game. It may not be possible, but it might be an interesting attempt.

Hehe - that actors tradition is for real, my mother lived by it and I have to think about it every time. Break a leg ;)

Like I said, I can't imagine the broad appeal of rehearsing that Scottish Play through role-playing gaming unless you prioritize performance.

addendum: and if if CANNOT be done, then that might tell us something about the use of the dramatic model as it applies to non-linear media.

Quite the opposite of what you're talking about I think, but someone published several Shakespeare conversions in DUNGEON Adventures Magazine awhile back for AD&D 2E. I know they were a nice read but I can't say how well they played out (never tried). I do remember thinking there was some railroading at the beginning of each scenario, but certainly not enough to cry about. I wish I could remember the titles of the adventures. Does The Oracle at Sumbar ring a bell with anyone?

Pete

As I started reading this thread, Sorcerer immediately came to mind. Then when Alyria was mentioned, I recognized that it, too, would be an excellent engine for this.

But then I think someone dubbed our imagined game The Tragedian, and my ancient education in dramatic literature came back to me. I think that something on this order would work quite well.

The key to Shakespeare's tragedies, we are told, is the Fatal Flaw in the central character. Hamlet, Othello, Romeo, and The Scot are all strong characters, but each has a fatal flaw. It is that flaw which ultimately forces the climax of the story. (IIRC, Othello's is jealousy mixed with inferiority--he cannot truly believe that Desdemona (?) loves him when Iago starts inventing lies about her; MacBeth's is his ambition, which, prompted by his wife's ambition, gets him to kill the King to obtain the throne and his friend Banquo to attempt to keep it.)

What interests me here is what would be necessary to build a game in which such a fatal flaw is a core part of the character, such that by acting on it he drives the story forward? I am less interested in whether we could role play the entire story of any of these plays by agreeing to do so; that's a simple task, really, as it's just improvisational acting around an agreed plot line with some resolution mechanics that should be geared to stay out of the way as much as possible. I am more interested in whether we could begin with a character designed as a traditional Tragic Hero and use that concept as the base for narrativist tension and resolution.

Thoughts?

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: But then I think someone dubbed our imagined game The Tragedian, and my ancient education in dramatic literature came back to me. I think that something on this order would work quite well.

The key to Shakespeare's tragedies, we are told, is the Fatal Flaw in the central character....

What interests me here is what would be necessary to build a game in which such a fatal flaw is a core part of the character, such that by acting on it he drives the story forward?

...I am more interested in whether we could begin with a character designed as a traditional Tragic Hero and use that concept as the base for narrativist tension and resolution.

Thoughts?

I will note, in passing, that Sheapspeare-oriented LARPS, where people play characters from various plays, have been a staple in ILF circles for quite some time now. Usually they take several similar plays (several of the comedies, perhaps) and set them together in the same place, and let the players go.

I'll always remember the simple mechanic they had for some of the mistaken identity stuff that goes on in a lot of the comedies: If you see someone wearing a particular color sash (blue, for example) and you later see someone else with the same blue sash on, act as if they're the same person.

I've been digesting some of the comments here, and am very intrigued by such LARP's; the more I thought about it the more LAP-like it became. I really like the idea of doing several of the comedies simultanesouly.

Anyway, thinking about vigorous scene setting with known characters, I had a thought about characters sheets and so forth, which are something of an obsession of mine. Now an actor doing this sort of thing might have cue-cards or similar which would jog their memory of the lines. There would be no need to have ALL the lines of course, only the ones for this scene. So how about treating character sheets in a similar manner. Instead of seeking to define the character universally and objectively, the character has several definitions, one in each scene, releative and relevant to that scene. Frex, Mark Anthony may have kickass combat skills, but they are not relevant during his Ceasar speech. What is relevant are perhaps relationships ala hero-wars, oratic and social/cultural expertise, that sort of thing. When a scene is a combat scene, a character has a combat sheet; when the scene is social, only social abilitites are represented.

Applying this more generally, even existing characters and games could be structured on such a scene format. The GM selects a subset of all the characters abilities/whathaveyou which are relevant to specific scenes, and the player works from a card bearing that subset for the scene.

Therre are overlaps here with the Arenas of Conflict idea; we are selecting abilities for relevance to an arena; another fairly radical approach might be to do character creation for each scene. This is amore conventional RPG style of play than the pseudo-LARP discusses in the Shakespearean context; the characters "go to see the king" as a scene, and from some pool of points or dice they purchase abilities relevant to that scene. Their might be continuity issues here, but a system should be able to work around those. This sort of pattern would allow for a player to "purchase", in different scenes, different expressions of a central concept. Frex, if the characters relationship with their father, is rocky, then at different times, the character may purchase different versions of the relationship trait to reflect the dynamic.

In all cases, I should point out that I amn considering attributes and whatnot as things which "commission later action" more or less rather than a governing or limiting system of balance. But the centrality od the idea is: not all of a characters abiolities are relevant in any given scene, and by zooming to the scene we comple focus ont hose characteristics which ARE relevant.

Edited thought: characters could and hopefully would spend points on clothing if we zoom in from the objective perspective. Because that kind of interpersonal matter would be centre stage in social contexts. Describing clothing becomes a constructive act rather than an incidental one.

Firstly, Ever since I first got into it, I have always thought of Amber as being a very shakespearian style game/environment. I think Robert Zelazny almost certainly had shakespearian influences infiltrating his brain while writing the first five books at least. IMHO it's an ideal game through which to explore shakespearian plot lines. MacBeth/Hamlet style throne war games are a staple of Amber DRPG game plotting. Romeo & Juliet relationships between offspring of the courts of Amber and Chaos aren't unknown, etc.

Secondly, one big problem with running a game based on a single play is that, for many of the participants in the plot, the events of the play are (initialy at least) only a small part of their life. The plays follow a particular few trains of events, while other events of importance to major characters occur offstage, yet thir effects on those characters still indirectly influence the main plot line.

This is why LARPS generaly take a number of different plot lines from similar sources and mash them together. Partly it's to explore alternative and perhaps cross-polinated plot lines, but it's also largely so that individual stories don't take place in an awkward vacuum. This would be hard to avoid in a typical RPG format.


Simon Hibbs

MacBeth can be done as roleplaying.

There are probably several ways, here are two.

1) The GM constructs the game as scenes. In each scene, the players are given goals for their characters. The scene carries on until characters reach their goals. This would be perhaps in the form of mini-larps or maybe by some form of token exchange where players get token for acting in role as opposed to deviating. If you help someone achieve their goal you get a token. The one with the most tokens wins the scene. Pantheon is a bit like this, it even has conflict resolution.

2) Improv theatre. The players 'workshop' their characters then join together to unfold the scene in what they hope is a natural way. The rules concern how far you can use another character in your piece of the exposé and whether you can say 'no' to what somebody proposes.

Cheers,
Steve

GB Steve wrote: MacBeth can be done as roleplaying.

There are probably several ways, here are two.

1) The GM constructs the game as scenes. In each scene, the players are given goals for their characters. ...

2) Improv theatre. The players 'workshop' their characters then join together to unfold the scene in what they hope is a natural way. ...