Split from http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9751

Bill quoted and then wrote:

In Narrativism: Story now, Ron Edwards wrote:
. . . if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?

Agreed. Can there be modules a la AD&D for Narrativist games? Or would that be antithetical to the style of play?

Well of Souls was an explicit attempt to design such a scenario. Here's the design phase, character creation & bang prep. Here's how it turned out:
Actual Play 1, 2, 3, and conclusion.

[edited once to rephrase 'bang prep' to include character creation]

I'd call Well of Souls something more like a supplement than a module. Because the idea of a module is that it can just be taken as is, and "plugged" into play. You just can't do that with narrativist prep.

That said, I think supplements like this can be of any length. Because if they're not just for "one-shot" consumption (which, again given narrativism you can't really assume), then they can include any amount of material. So, unlike Well, I can envision really big supplements that have multiple relationship maps, and other such tools, and general information to enhance play in this style. Remember that it's not metagame or "unnarrativist" to have a set backdrop. So you can have handouts, for instance (Ron does).

I could easily see something like this getting voluminous fast.

Mike

Hi,

ScottM wrote: Well of Souls was an explicit attempt to design such a scenario. Here's the design phase, character creation & bang prep. Here's how it turned out:
Actual Play 1, 2, 3, and conclusion.

[edited once to rephrase 'bang prep' to include character creation]

Hi there,

My conception of such a thing is very much like the back-stories and relationship maps in The Sorcerer's Soul. Can they be "run" like a module? No - in fact, not at all. But are they very useful plug-ins for an existing set of Kickers and setup? Yes, I think so.

The only other version would be a 95%-er like In Utero, in which, frankly, you aren't really playing the game in full. It'd be like learning basketball by pretending both teams are tied at the end of the fourth quarter and doing a Sudden Death.

Best,
Ron

I think a Narrativist module could be designed, but it runs the (strong) risk of a premise that fails to engage, as it is very (very!) tricky to aim a meaningful issue at a bunch of strangers and expect them to fit neatly into pre-arranged places around it, even if those places are broadly defined.

If I were to try and do something like that, I would be incline to make it something like a How to Host a Murder game. Prebuilt relationship map, a set of kickers instead of the HtHaM set of clues, and time or circumstance limits to close off a given 'round' of kickers. Possibly use pastiche to set it into a known setting, as HtHaM does, maybe not. Still darn tricky, and runs the risk of the imbedded premise not grabbing some/all of the people involved.

Rambling on the fly,

James

James,

No worse than picking up a module to run an Ancient Egypt-theme pyramid tomb crawl when your group thinks Egypt is for sissies and what they want are forgotten Chinese cities overrun by demons.

The GM just needs to know what his group likes to play and pick something up appropriate.

Ron,

Yeah, that does need to be pointed out and I skipped over it; I think there can be "Narrativist modules" but they would be decidedly different entities than your standard adventure/module package for something like D&D. Much more like kickstart kits or "plug-n-play" campaign starters than keyed dungeon maps.

Still, I think it's a cool idea, and if I ever wanted to get into a Nar-heavy game it'd be nice to have something like this around.

I think that narrativist modules are possible--they just look different.

Seth, in trying to run demos for Legends of Alyria, devised a complete set-up, characters, setting, starting points, everything needed to run a game. In essence, he took away from the players the part where you create the story map and the characters, and went to "play starts here".

That's what a module does--it takes out the prep time and says "play starts here, and proceeds in this direction".

In most (not all) gamist modules, that means maps showing where things are, descriptions saying what's in them, ratings of the challenges ahead, and similar structural components. In a narrativist game, you might never need any of those (although some of them might be valuable, and could be prepared in advance if their necessity to the story was fairly foreseeable).

Since a module is essentially a pre-packaged collection of everything you need to begin an adventure, it looks very different in a narrativist context, but serves the same function.

--M. J. Young

M.J.,

The classic modules are much more than packages to get an adventure started, they are the adventure. You're buying Illusionism off the shelf; they players have their characters, they start at the Beginning, and you work them to the End. They're for DMs who didn't have the ability or time to craft their own Illusions.

Now obviously not every DM used them that way, but it was - and still is - the design goal for them. (And here I'm speaking of D&D modules specifically, as I have very little experience with others; although Shadowrun modules/adventures were exactly the same.)

In general,

Nate and I were talking a bit about this in #indierpgs tonight and he suggested you couldn't hardcore Premise in, that it would be a mistake. But I refer to my "Common GNS sticking points" thread; dealing with the Premise is what -makes- Narrativist play, isn't it? Having a storymap, or having or not having a keyed dungeon map, doesn't have anything to do with any mode. You must have the Premise for a Nar-promoting module; otherwise, it's just a bunch of Situation.

Which is great and all, but doesn't really promote any mode in particular.

anonymouse wrote: The classic modules are much more than packages to get an adventure started, they are the adventure. You're buying Illusionism off the shelf; they players have their characters, they start at the Beginning, and you work them to the End. They're for DMs who didn't have the ability or time to craft their own Illusions. ... I'm speaking of D&D modules specifically, as I have very little experience with others; although Shadowrun modules/adventures were exactly the same.

Nate and I were talking a bit about this in #indierpgs tonight and he suggested you couldn't hardcore Premise in, that it would be a mistake. ...

anonymouse wrote: The classic modules are much more than packages to get an adventure started, they are the adventure. You're buying Illusionism off the shelf; they players have their characters, they start at the Beginning, and you work them to the End. They're for DMs who didn't have the ability or time to craft their own Illusions.

Now obviously not every DM used them that way, but it was - and still is - the design goal for them. (And here I'm speaking of D&D modules specifically, as I have very little experience with others; although Shadowrun modules/adventures were exactly the same.)

Hal, the RM "modules" were pretty much "open sim" (meaning no force). Making them really like little supplements. In the back there would be suggestions for adventures to run in the area described, and usually the setting had some elements that seemed like obvious goals. But the idea was pretty clearly that the GM had to "hook" the characters with something, and then they'd explore the map.

In practice you ended up with a lot of illusionism. I've "played" them all, BTW. The Shadow World ones as a GM, and the ME ones as a player (ugh).

Mike

anonymouse wrote: The classic modules are much more than packages to get an adventure started, they are the adventure. You're buying Illusionism off the shelf; they players have their characters, they start at the Beginning, and you work them to the End. They're for DMs who didn't have the ability or time to craft their own Illusions.

Halzebier wrote: Most Rolemaster modules I'm familiar with provide just a situation charged with potential conflict (i.e. motives, a timeline for what happens if no one interferes, and stuff like maps etc.). The GM sets up a playground, and then the players may do whatever they want. Wasn't there a term for this?

Hi John,

With all the usual provisos that go with statements like this, I get a strong Narrativist whiff from the James Bond rules. Not like in Prince Valiant, which simply seizes the reader from behind and mugs him in the Narrativist alley, but a whiff anyway.

I'm not familiar with the modules, and look forward to what you think in that regard.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: With all the usual provisos that go with statements like this, I get a strong Narrativist whiff from the James Bond rules. Not like in Prince Valiant, which simply seizes the reader from behind and mugs him in the Narrativist alley, but a whiff anyway.

I'm not familiar with the modules, and look forward to what you think in that regard.

It would, sort of by definition, be extremely difficult to write a module for a game where players define the situations that confront them.

On the other hand, it should not be hard to write a good narrativist-facilitating module if you're working with the assumption that (a) you have a GM and (b) the GM is at least partly in charge of the settings and situations that confront the players. (This is not to say those are good assumptions, or that RPing is in any way better with them in place!) What you need is:

(a) a setting

(b) some interesting NPCs with goals of their own

(c) some suggestions for striking events that could involve both PCs and NPCs

(d) rough suggestions about what NPCs and/or broader setting elements might do in response to PC actions, but probably only the vaguest of timelines, if any, so that PC action drives the story

The key thing, I would think, would be to give the players elements out of which they could build a story, and which would confront them with interesting choices in response to what they would do.

I don't see any reason you wouldn't call this a module.

I'd like also to agree with MJ that earlier posts about 'classic' modules involving railroading are wrong. (I assume that the word 'classic' refers exclusively to pre-1980 materials: later D&D and non-D&D stuff alike features heavy railroading in many cases.) What early D&D modules were as I found them were settings, with information mostly for facilitating Gamist play, but which could be applied to anything one felt like at the moment. Three that come immediately to mind as 'dungeons' that wound up producing more narrative-leaning than competition-leaning play in our group's hands were Village of Hommlet, Dark Tower, and especially Vault of the Drow, where we ran two full independent campaigns. One of these served as a break from the GDQ march-through, involving a PC half-elf who had fallen in love with Eclavdra disguising himself as a half-Drow and starting a rebel army in the caves on the border in the hopes of somehow protecting Eclavdra from the Fane and stopping her from conquering the world above at the same time. The other was not even in the context of the GDQ series: we played a gaslight magic/mystery campaign set in Erelhei-Cinlu. (It's weird to think that there was a time when the Drow were sort of new and interesting, at least to me, in light of what's come since.) So that's my two cents on that.

I'd like to jump on the classic-modules-don't-mean-railroading bandwagon.

The real rails were put down by well-meaning editors and writers in the game companies who want to help players produce "story." The created colorful NPCs, often with emotional "agendas" (in one way or another), a flow from set up to climax, and potential "hooks" designed to help make a random bunch of PCs without an investment in module care about it out of the blue.

The problems are obvious now with hindsite: since the NPCs arrived with solid emotional agendas tied directly to the story the way the PCs never could be, the story was really more or less driven by them, about them, and focused on them; the need to "flow" the story to a pre-printed climax meant that whatever the Players might have wanted to focus on had to be hidden behind the window drapery, in ever a genteel fashion (usually with everyone in hiding); and the hooks never really worked very well outside of: This is your job, you care cause it's your job.

The game lines I'm aware of that went this route were: Shadowrun, Earthdawn, DC Heroes, Torg, Star Wars (1st), many AD&D 2nd. I'm sure there were more.

The trick was, many people wanted more story, more emotional invetment for the characters (and thus the players), but pretty much nobody had a clue that so many assumptions about roleplaying would have to be ditched to make it work. Most of these "story" modules were dungeon maps reconfigures as scene blocks with arrows conneting them instead of rooms with tunnels connecting them. Uh-hu. That's not going to work.

In many respects, as far as Nar modules goes, I'd tweak Sean's first suggestion above (setting) to A Premise Rich Setting. Glorantha, for example, is premise rich.

As a counter example, almost all of Shadowrun is not. FASA purposely, and cleverly, built the PCs as outcasts from society. Their sole function was to keep getting money while remaining outside of society. There was no suggestion that a family, friends or any kind of connection to anyone or anything but the team mattered. (Even spiritual energy, in the form of Shamans, remained a solitary venture.) There are no premise decisions to be made, because even before play starts, all ties to anything but your bank account have been severed. (The shadowrunner group exists only to fortify the chance of success on a job.)

So, A Premise Rich Setting, and then add with Lots of Sockets for the PCs to Plug Into. Thus, you end up with what Ron writes for his Sorcerer settings.

What I'd add to make it more "modual-ly" is photocopy pages that break down the premise elements into handouts for the players. They don't *need* to know all the details about the setting. They do need to know there's a tension between faith and family.... And let them know that, quick and easy. Then, during the character creation session they can go down the Menus of Premise Richness, asking the GM questions when they want. The whole group starts filling in the details, picking character traits and history that plug them into the Premise or not.

As for specific tales, I again think we turn to Sorcerer: a relationship map, stats for those NPCs. Assign Kickers (or SAs, or whatever is going to get you through the night), and reconvene in a week after the GM's done the fleshout out prep work.

As for an out of the box Nar model.... I don't think it's going to happen.

Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I'd like to jump on the classic-modules-don't-mean-railroading bandwagon.

The real rails were put down by well-meaning editors and writers in the game companies who want to help players produce "story." The created colorful NPCs, often with emotional "agendas" (in one way or another), a flow from set up to climax, and potential "hooks" designed to help make a random bunch of PCs without an investment in module care about it out of the blue.
...
The game lines I'm aware of that went this route were: Shadowrun, Earthdawn, DC Heroes, Torg, Star Wars (1st), many AD&D 2nd. I'm sure there were more.

Hi John,

100% agreement. I used to get incredible Narrativist mileage out of old Champions adventure modules specifically because they (usually) didn't pre-suppose a plot, and they did include tons of Premise-rich content like family feuds and romances.

Best,
Ron

I've noticed several (heck, most) of the adventures published for Unknown Armies follow this structure. They outline a situation, characters, the relationships between these characters, and introduce one or more reasons for conflict to spring from the situation.

"Prison Break" from One-Shots is a popular demonstration module, and its success rests entirely on the fact that each of the pregenerated PCs has elements of their personality that are going to throw them into conflict with each other.

I haven't noticed adventures of this kind having an explicitly stated Premise, but one seems to be implied in almost every case.

Hi Andrew,

My issue (speaking strictly in Narrativist terms) is that the Unknown Armies scenario books tend to be 95%ers. So much of the story is under way by the time play begins, that the player-characters' decisions more or less merely decide whose bullet hits whom. Not only is Premise locked down, but theme typically is too.

From a play-it-out Simulationist experiential perspective, it rocks, though.

Best,
Ron