Narrative Control Forums

Excellent podcast, I am in agreement with most of your analysis of Mamet's letter, however when you said that you didn't think that repeated failure was a good thing I think you are missing something. In the letter Mamet is specifically talking about 'EPISODE' structure (He specifically says episode, see the quote below). An episode for a television show is almost the same thing as a session in a table-top game. As Mamet says, the hero must have a compelling reason to have shown up in the scene. He must then fail to achieve his 'ACUTE GOAL' which drive the plot forward.

Perhaps I give too much credit to Mamet, but I think the use of the term 'ACUTE GOAL' is very wise. Acute goals are small goals, much like in Burning Wheel, hero's have immediate goals, and long term goals. The immediate goals drive the plot forward in the scene and session you are currently running, and the long terms goals play out over the course of the campaign.

I need to quote Mamet here for a second, and then I will try to make my point: THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MEET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE, TO FAILURE - THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

So, he is talking about how an episode should play out (in other words writing plot). Each episode builds towards a season, at the finale of the season the big goal is achieved, but each episode must help build the drama. Drama is built with failure and conflict. Each episode must therefore go as follows. Scene 1:Fail, Scene 2:Fail, Scene 3:Fail, ... End Scene: Acute Success -> Lead into next episode.

Sean, you specifically said it yourself in the podcast. You said you like characters that "succeed when it really counts." We all like to see heroes fail on the interstitial (big word!) elements but come out on top at the end. As you said that's every Harrison Ford character!

Acute goal setting is like Zelda, you get a piece of the Triforce each time, or Mario Bros, "you saved 3 Toadstools, but the Princess is in another Castle" (of course these are video game examples, and are too rigid to directly apply to open ended table-top gaming, please forgive me). At least that's my interpretation of Mamet's term acute goals.

I could stop there, but there were two other things that caught my ear during the podcast.

First, the Swashbucklers example Sean gave is great. All heroes should be awesome all the time, and it's just the world that conspires against them to make them fail. I think this is endlessly applicable to any table-top game or TV Drama. Great insight.

Second, you guys were both hung up on how to deal with failure in scenes where some of the heroes succeed and some fail. I don't see this as being a problem at all. In fact, I think partial party failure is one of the strongest game component that exists in table-top systems in terms of creating interesting conflict. I will use the snake pit scenario you used in the podcast to explain.

Four heroes must swing across the snake pit to continue on their way further into the cave, ultimately working their way to the treasure room and the escape chute (but let's add a ticking bomb to the situation just to make it even more dramatic), before the booby-trapped cave collapses on them (let's say a trap was set my the Ancients, so that if anyone where to trespass into the cave would collapse in 30 minutes after intrusion). One hero is deathly afraid of snakes (let's hope he falls). The three fearless heroes roll successes and swing across to safety, the scared hero falters due to fear (for dramatic effect). The party is beckoning him across telling him that they must hurry before the cave collapses. The hero rolls, and fails (perfect!). Screams issue from beneath, and the 3 other heroes must make a fast choice, move on, or save their friend. Perhaps an argument breaks out, revealing everyone true feelings towards the fallen party member (excellent drama I'm sure). Players roll some die for diplomacy and to resolve the argument (as you would in Burning Wheel). The 3 heroes, decide to jump in after their fallen friend...

Long story short, the snakes were gross and dangerous, but during their daring rescue a trap door was discovered in the pit that provided a short cut to the treasure room (thanks GM!). They scooped up as much treasure and poured in down the escape chute before the supports gave way and collapsed the cave. The heroes escape rich men!

What I am getting as is that partial failure or success can be just as helpful as full party failure or success. When a party has to make a hard choice like that it creates drama and conflict. Perhaps it takes more creativity on the GM's part to make the scene still work, but I would expect nothing less from a good GM.

Sorry for the huge posting. I am curious to know if you agree with me, or if you had already come to these conclusions but didn't record them for the podcast.

Wow, thanks a ton for the thoughtful and extensive post. I've racing between home and work right now but what I didn't say in the podcast and maybe should have is this:

In my head I have this ideal of the perfect gamer, the person that looks at failures as opportunities to explore their character, their relationships and their setting. Then I stack that image of the idea gamer up against my experiences and find so often that players will do everything they can to win in EVERY conflict. The reasons for this vary (and I'll go into them if you're interested when I have a bit more time) but the only game I've ever run where I felt like players accepted failure well (in fact even embraced it) was when I did Burning Wheel and the set the "fail" conditions as something gloriously awesome. Often things like, you do this but someone else gets the credit and you look like a total ass. Or you fail but this opens up a new opportunity that didn't exist. In that game I had the perfect players... but it was a fleeting moment.

Okay... more when I have time, but thanks again for the post and your thoughts.

Sean & Fattig,
Great topic and good coverage. I'm posting before I go read the source article because I want to get my initial reaction out while the podcast is fresh in my head.

I'm an inexperienced GM for a small group. We're a very laid-back and casual group, but I do see what you mean about players always trying to win every conflict. In my case, it's a sense of frustration from the players after a series of poor rolls, even when those rolls result in more action.

I believe that this issue is tightly linked with a few factors. First is possibly some "baggage" from games where only success is ever rewarded (you know the games I mean). These games that have a strong pass/fail condition and failure is frequently a road block to progress for the PCs. To the players, they are more "game" and less "drama", in that sense. I think it's very hard, even for me, to let this go.

The next factor is game design, and more specifically, the role of chance in the mechanics. Dice-based RPGs almost universally use dice rolls to determine the positive or negative effect of a PC's actions. The result is usually a signal to players that bad/low rolls should always be avoided. So I wonder, is there another use for chance in games that breaks away from the notion of pass/fail or win/lose entirely? I think Fattig has it right, that maybe we should find ways to get away from terms of "fail" and "lose".

About your dream for "the perfect gamer"... it would be cool to game with you sometime.

regards,
Kevin

Kevin,

My sentiments exactly, I would love a shot at running a game with Sean, and probably yourself given your above comments. I'm in suburban Chicago so the "dream" will have to wait...

Regarding your notion that players come with baggage and expectations in regards to win/lose, pass/fail situations: My experience is that people who are interested in playing table-top games probably played video game RPG's first, and they come to the table wanting and expecting a video game. In other words they come expecting everything to be figured out for them (probably by the GM, who takes the place of the game cartridge) and they just want to go on an adventure, hear a story, pick from predetermined options, and ultimately win at every opportunity (as you would in a video game).

The difficulty is trying to explain to this type of gamer that table-top gaming (or at least more indie games) is, and should be, about honest to goodness ROLE-PLAYING and DRAMA. RPG video games often times are not role-playing, they are stats and battle. There is not much room for growth, and certainly no room for failure (resulting in reloading your save game file).

I struggle with my gaming group on this subject constantly, and it seems no matter how I re-phrase or re-tool a game mechanic there are just certain player-types that refuse to let games be dynamic, who refuse to get into character and ultimately refuse to really role-play.

My frustrations with this exact issue has caused our gaming group to take a break and stop playing for a while. In the meantime I have taken up writing fiction, as a solo task, and the more I get into writing the more I wish I could get my game group back together and really play a good dramatic game.

Here's wishing the "dream" comes true!

*I changed my user name to my real name for clarity, I used to use Orkinnman*

I found this relevant blog entry on Random Average, via Gnome Stew today:
http://random-average.com/index.php/2010/04/i-bleed-and-take-another-action/

Adam, thanks. I'm in Virginia, but I do play over the interweb, if your up for that.

Thankfully I don't have any "I wanna play computer games with dice" type players. However, I do see your point.

I recently read Dogs in the Vineyard, and I'm pretty excited to try it. I'm very interested in the way players can choose when to "Take a Blow" and when to block or reverse the blow (depending on their dice, of course), and that taking fallout is the best way to improve your character.

We've been playing Wushu lately, with the Roanoke setting. This system allows the PCs to always look awesome, because you narrate your PC's action exactly as it happens. The dice just decide who gets the final say.

But I think, in the end, it's might be best to find more players who share your style, rather then fighting against people's preferences. But that can take some looking around. I'm hoping to attend some local cons this year, with that goal in mind.

Kevin

Kevin, I liked that link you provided.

The last comment posted by The Fierce reads: "I’ve always gone off the 'V for Vendetta' economics: you can have everything but that last inch… so as a GM, I want to know what would make the characters give up that last inch, and as a player, I want to know what makes that last inch valuable." That resonates with me very strongly.

If a character wants to gain something they must lose something else, or if a character wants to win the war they are going to have to lose some of the battles...

In my research for a alternate history campaign I was going to run set during the American Revolution, I read a lot about Washington's military strategy. I found it interesting that he didn't focus on winning battles, he only meant to frustrate and wear the British down over a long campaign by holding 90% of the American territory. Washington only won a handful of battles, but as Sean says, he won when it really counted.

I am anxious to hear Sean or Eric's responses to all that has been discussed here.

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for the link. Yeah man! We totally are on the same wavelength here. I put a comment on the bottom, crediting you for linking it and linked him back here if he's interested.

I played a couple games of Fiasco recently and that game has jack all or resolution mechanics. It goes something like this, in each scene the player can choose either how it starts or how it ends. So you get narrative control either of what you'll be doing, or how you'll end. The other players collectively get control of whichever one you don't pick. The only factor that steers it one way or the other is that there is a pile of black and white dice. Whoever ends the scene picks up one. If it's white the scene ends well for the protagonist, if it's black it end badly.

So we sat around and talked about what would make sense for this character in this scene? What would be funny, horrible and awesome at the same time? It was great, we threw out ideas and most of the time went with the first one someone suggested. Every once in a while we disagreed and even that was simple to resolve. If the player had narrative control, they picked. If the group did, we only had three other players (four total) so we had a casual vote, and boom, scene resolved.

Bad things happened to our characters, horrible things, but never once did anyone win or fail. We just did stuff and saw which direction it went.

Now this kind of hippie free form Jason Morningstar mechanics won't work for everyone or every game, but it did illustrate (or at least remind me) that when the resolution is "who gets to pick what happens" rather than "win/fail" then every conflict ends in awesome (or at least it can, some of our ideas weren't awesome, but we kept rolling anyway).

Giving narrative control however, isn't something you can do lightly. My first experience with this was playing Wilderness of Mirrors, where players roll and if they roll well they get narrative control, if they rolled low I got it and if they rolled in the middle it was shared. What I found was that not all the players were playing the same game. We'd have some people narrating scene endings that just didn't make sense to others because they were playing Bond, while someone else was playing Austin Powers, while someone else was playing Jason Borne. All spies, sure, but from a different genre.

Also, I was still trying to “tell” as story back then and when you give people total narration, you can’t tell them anything. It’s the ultimate expression no adventure survives first contact with the players.

It doesn't surprise me at all that in Houses of the Blooded John Wick (who also make Wilderness of Mirrors) tightened down the narrative control A LOT. Essentially allowing the players to only answer the question yes or no, unless they took wagers to add in details. And even then every detail cost a wager, so they couldn’t go wild.

PTA is the king of this and I think taught me a lot about how to take narrative control in ways that make the game more fun for everyone rather than being either a) selfish "look how awesome I am" fun or b) dead end, now the story has no way to go not-fun. Get a group to play PTA for a while, with some show in mind that they all like (or similar to something they all like), where all the players understand how the show “should” turn out. Once you’ve got people on that wavelength, switch back to a more traditional game and see if they understand “yeah, in these scene my character totally should fall on his ass in the duel and make fool of himself, that would be epic!”

Well, that’s my idea at least. I can’t say I’ve got enough empirical evidence to show that it really works.

Adam,

Your quote from the Fierce is awesome. I love the idea of asking a player "What does your character need?" Then playing out in game, what they will do if they can't quite get it. For V (at least in the movie, I've heard the comics portrayed Edie differently) he wanted to win the hearts of the people and give them courage, but the one person he really wanted to truly win over, he disgusted on a very personal level. She believed in his message, and maybe even loved in a way, but betrayed him and would continue to betray him because of the horrors he had committed.

Beliefs (ala Burning Wheel) are great for this because they give the player and the GM some really clear direction as to what the character needs and when they fail to achieve these goals, how they've grown as people. Personally I like to track all of my character's beliefs to see what matter to them over the course of a game. It's the most concrete measurement of character "growth" that I've been able to muster.

Regarding your first post about failure, I don't see David ever advocating success in his letter. He talks about a hero's quest to overcome the obstacles that stand in his way, but for him (at least as I read it) Drama is always failure. It's why romances almost never work out in TV shows. Once you've won, it's boring. So the writers constantly throw strife in the middle to keep it exciting. Now if you hammered on David and said flat out "c'mon, at some point the hero has to win, right? At the end of the story at least?" I'm not sure what he'd say. I bet he'd tell you "THAT’S WHAT THE BLUESUITS WANT." [1]

I think what you took from it though was the real meaning of his letter, make the audience (and in this case that is the players) always want for more, always have something they need. Thus even if they've won, you still hold the carrot.

[1] After reading this letter I can't help but think of David as a very loud man, someone that talks, acts and writes in ALL CAPS!