jeuderologie: references/narr_essay.txt@2365462d45a5

Narrativism: Story Now

Acknowledgments are due to Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Christopher Kubasik,
Jesse Burneko, Paul Czege, Clinton R. Nixon, Vincent Baker, Seth Ben-Ezra,
M. J. Young, Chris Chinn, Pete Darby, Gordon C. Landis, Walt Freitag, and
Matt Snyder for comments on the first draft of this essay. All mistakes or
misattributions should be considered my responsibility.

This is the third of three essays building upon the topics addressed in
"GNS and other matters of role-playing theory"
([9]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/). The previous two essays were
"Simulationism: The Right to Dream"
([10]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/), and "Gamism: Step On Up"
([11]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/). This series' purposes are to
clarify the original essay and to develop and incorporate insights from
discussions at the Forge.

This one is about Narrativist play, which is simultaneously the least and
most problematic of the Creative Agendas I've described. It's incredibly
easy in application, and the most difficult for discussion. I think that
this difficulty lies mainly in some of the peculiarities of
role-player/gamer culture, entrenched in the history of the hobby, rather
than any particular logical or cognitive hitches in the mode of play
itself.

In the first two essays, I began presenting an overall model of
role-playing, but piecemeal and in stumbling verbal form. As of this
writing, I've finished that model, and it is included here as well. It's a
bit out of place, being more of a capstone or umbrella to the three essays
rather than an intrinsic piece of the Narrativist one. More complete
discussions about it may also be found in "The whole model - this is it"
([12]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655).

History of the term

The Threefold Model for role-playing included the term Dramatism, as
presented by John Kim at his Threefold Model
([13]http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/) webpage. When I learned
about the Threefold, I'd already been thinking about stuff I'd later call
Currency and also about Jonathan Tweet's discussion of resolution
presented in Everway. The basic notion of the Threefold impressed me: it
was time to talk about goals and priorities independently of everything
else, then to see whether everything else flowed to and from them. This
was at the time that Sorcerer was making its small way into commerce, so
the mailing list was the place for our first discussions; most of them are
archived at the Sorcerer website ([14]http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com).

At this point, since "Drama" as a resolution category in Tweet's schema
and "Dramatism" as a goals-category in the Threefold referred to two
different things, I decided that the names were confusing. Going by which
set of ideas was first presented (Tweet's), I changed Dramatism to
Narrativism. This terminological change was limited to discussions on the
Sorcerer mailing list and later at the Gaming Outpost.

However, our use of the terms and ideas on the Sorcerer mailing list took
on its own character almost immediately, such that in my first essay
"System Does Matter" ([15]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/11/), "story"
was already its own distinct, process-oriented term.

The biggest change in my thinking about role-playing is represented in the
essay "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory"
([16]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), in which the concept of
Exploration becomes the underlying foundation for the three modes or goals
of play. This new picture was startling: (1) potential story elements were
now considered present for all three modes play, and (2)Narrativism now
appeared to be a mirror image or twin sibling of Gamism, counter to older
impressions shared by me and anyone else who ever wrote about role-playing
that Gamism was the odd man out.

I've tried to emphasize this new outlook throughout these three supportive
essays. Whereas I think most people think of Gamism with (or synonymous
with) its Hard Core variant over in one ballpark, with Simulationism
containing an internal "story" variant in another ballpark, my concepts
are radically different. I hope to make this picture, and its
implications, entirely clear in this essay.

The foundation: Exploration and more

Here's the big ol' model for role-playing that the previous two essays
sort of fumbled at. Notice that "rules" are absent; I now consider "rules"
simply to mean text, which may be about anything you find in the model.
The brackets are very important: if B relates to A as [A[B]], then B is
considered a part, application, version, or expression of A.

[Social Contract]. Social Contract encompasses everything else about
role-playing. If these people happen to be role-playing together, then
Social Contract crucially includes "Let's play this game." This crucial
element is what's further subdivided throughout the rest of this model.

[Social Contract [Exploration]]. Exploration means "shared imaginings."
The sharing has to be explicit and agreed upon, usually through the spoken
word although any form of communication counts. The imaginings have to be
the subject that is shared, which is why me reading aloud to my wife does
not constitute Exploration. We are independently imagining based on the
spoken word, but neither she nor I is telling the other what we imagine
from that point. Exploration means that such communication is occurring.

The five elements of Exploration are interdependent: Character + Setting
make Situation, System permits Situation to "move," and Color affects all
the others. This concept applies only to the imaginary causes among the
elements; the real people's actual priority or cause among these things,
in social and creative terms, varies widely. See my essay "GNS and other
matters of role-playing theory"
([17]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/) for more about these elements.

[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda]]]. Creative Agenda is the
blanket term for people's demonstrated goals and desired feedback during
play. In the past, I called it "GNS." Since all of this is enclosed in
Social Contract, GNS-stuff is not only "what I want" but also "what I want
from role-playing with this group of people." Since Exploration
necessarily includes System, that means, as soon as we start talking about
Creative Agenda, real play has begun.

On paper, I draw this term as an arrow, because this "step" or "level" in
my model shifts out of the abstract and solidly into this group, playing
this game, this way, at this time. The model instantly ceases to be a
broad overview and becomes a diagnostic or description of a real
play-experience among real people. Unless you are thinking of such a case,
you will be left flailing at this point in the discussion.

[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques]]]]. The
panoply of Techniques being employed over time either satisfy or fail to
satisfy one or more Creative Agendas. Techniques include IIEE,
Drama/Karma/Fortune, search time & handling time, narration apportioning,
reward system, points of contact, character components, scene framing,
currency among the character components, and much more. Each of these
terms represents a range of potential play-methods. I consider the two
most important Techniques to be reward system and IIEE (see glossary).

Techniques may be thought of as directly expressing the more abstract
concept of System (way up in Exploration), except that System doesn't
exist all by itself - it's fully integrated with the other components of
Exploration. But if you keep that in mind, then yes, the arrow represented
by Creative Agenda can indeed be "shot" from the bow of System.

Techniques do not map 1:1 to Creative Agenda, but combinations of
Techniques do support or obstruct Creative Agendas.

[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques
[Ephemera]]]]]. Ephemera refers to the smallest-scale interactions and
activities of role-playing: anything that gets factored into or is
expressed by play in the space of a few seconds. As with every level/box
so far, fairly extensive combinations of Ephemera express or apply to one
or more Techniques. They are the internal anatomy, if you will, of
Techniques and hence (conceptualizing upward) of System.

Ephemera include individual Stances, in-character vs. out-of-character
diction and dialogue, referring to texts, sound effects, taking or
referring to notes, kibitzing, laughing, praise or disapproval, showing
pictures, and anything similar.

Understanding any Creative Agenda, in this case Narrativism, means
examining its potential roles and expressions in the whole model.
Narrativism's little code phrase for that purpose is "Story Now."

Story

Long ago, I concluded that "story" as a role-playing term was standing in
for several different processes and goals, some of which were
incompatible. Here's the terms-breakdown I'll be using from now on.

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go
ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where
they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the
"transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little
something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a
certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript
has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.

Let's say that the following transcript, which also happens to be a story,
arose from one or more sessions of role-playing.

Lord Gyrax rules over a realm in which a big dragon has begun to ravage
the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying
to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also
meets this beautiful, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at
times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that she and the dragon
are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically
in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her.
Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to
quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he
goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and
trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse
is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay
the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's
now all old, to his home.

The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a
story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during
the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether
people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination
of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The
mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based
issue.

Story Now

Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature
of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing. "Address"
means:

* Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world,
"fixing" them into imaginary place.

* Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps
changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being
taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the
antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.

* Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the
protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the
circumstances.

Can it really be that easy? Yes, Narrativism is that easy. The Now refers
to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create
those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying
attention to one another as they do it. To do that, they relate to "the
story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays,
and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments. Think of
the Now as meaning, "in the moment," or "engaged in doing it," in terms of
input and emotional feedback among one another. The Now also means "get to
it," in which "it" refers to any Explorative element or combination of
elements that increases the enjoyment of that issue I'm talking about.

There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have
such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole
point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). Story Now has a
great deal in common with Step On Up, particularly in the social
expectation to contribute, but in this case the real people's attention is
directed toward one another's insights toward the issue, rather than
toward strategy and guts.

Say it yourself

I receive a lot of emails like this one from Landon Darkwood:

I think I may have had a revelation.

... In your Simulationism essay, you have this: "'Story,' in this context,
refers to the sequence of events that provide a payoff in terms of
recognizing and enjoying the genre during play."

Is this the key to distinguishing the [Narrativist vs. Simulationist] play
modes? My intepretation of this statement is that in Simulationist gaming,
a long and complex story might come about and be part of play, but only
for the express purpose of bringing about all the appropriate genre
elements in the game as part of the internal consistency of the Dream.
i.e., a Sim game Colored with elements from Chinese wuxia movies might
have a multilayered story involving class conflict, people being trapped
by their social position, repressed romance, heavy action, a sorcerer and
his eunuch henchmen - but these are all trappings of the genre. So, their
inclusion in the game, part and parcel as they are to the Dream, isn't
Narrativist because no one is creating a theme that isn't already there.
In other words, it's just played out as the Situation part of the
Exploration; because the Dream calls for it, there just so happens to be a
kind of intricacy involved.

In Narrativism, by contrast, the major source of themes are the ones that
are brought to the table by the players / GM (if there is one) regardless
of the genre or setting used. So, to sum up, themes in Nar play are
created by the participants and that's the point; themes in Sim play are
already present in the Dream, reinforced by the play, and kind of a
by-product.

Am I on this now?

"In a word," I replied, "Yes."

Narrativism has a single definition, but it's difficult to articulate for
people grappling with muddled RPG terminology. As far as I was concerned,
not only had I presented what Landon said in "GNS and other matters of
role-playing theory" ([18]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), I'd
repeated it dozens of times in forum discussions. In fact, I'd said it in
the message to Landon that immediately preceded this reply. But he had to
say it himself, with his own use of words like "just" and "genre." I am
now convinced, after many such exchanges, that an "experienced"
role-player comes to this conclusion only by working it out in his or her
own terms and examples.

Premise

How is this done, actually, in play? It relies on the concept of something
called Premise and its relationship to an emergent theme.

I already snuck Premise past you: it's that "problematic issue" I
mentioned. I've taken the term from The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos
Egri. In reading what follows, bear in mind that he is discussing the
process of writing, not an existing playscript or a performance:

... every good premise is composed of three parts, each of which is
essential to a good play. Let us examine "frugality equals waste." The
first part of this premise suggest character - a frugal character. The
second part, "leads to," suggests conflict, and the third part, "waste,"
suggests the end of the play. ...

A good premise is a thumbnail synopsis of your play. [examples follow,
including "Egotism leads to loss of friends." - RE]

... What is wrong, then? What is missing?

The author's conviction is missing. Until he takes sides, there is no
play. Does egotism lead to loss of friends? Which side will you take? We,
the readers or spectators of your play, do not necessarily agree with your
convictions. Through your play you must therefore prove to us the validity
of your contention.

A protagonist is not "some guy," but rather "the guy who thinks THIS, and
does something accordingly when he encounters adversity." Stories are not
created by running some kind of linear-cause program, but rather are
brutally judgmental statements upon the THIS, as an idea or a way of
being. That judgment is enacted or exemplified in the resolution of the
conflict, and a conviction that is proved to us (as Egri says),constitutes
theme. Even if we (the audience) disagree with it, we at least must have
been moved to do so at an emotional level.

I think that any reliable means of story-writing, in any medium, conforms
to Egri's principles. They may seem simplistic: the burning passion of the
protagonist directly expresses a burning passion of the author's, who uses
the plot as a polemic to demonstrate it. However, "Why Johnny shouldn't
smoke dope" is only the starting point. More nuanced, ambiguous, and
insightful applications arise insofar as more nuanced, ambiguous, and
insightful authors and audiences are involved.

I said earlier that any role-playing can produce a story, and that's so.
But Narrativist role-playing is defined by the people involved placing
their direct creative attention toward Premise and toward birthing its
child, theme. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. The real variable
is the emotional connection that everyone at the table makes when a
player-character does something. If that emotional connection is
identifiable as a Premise, and if that connection is nurtured and
developed through the real-people interactions, then Narrativist play is
under way. Some nuances:

* "Character does something" can mean foreshadowing, flashback, and
anything in between. It can mean the character is just thinkin' about
it, or it can mean the character flat-out does it. As long as the
fictional character is brought into the perceptions and possible
emotional responses of the other people at the table, then it counts.

* It doesn't matter whether the character fictionally "meant" to do the
action, premeditated it, or acted on-the-spot.

* In stories (unlike real life), the character's immediate environment
is kind of a weird sidekick, who sometimes acts in the character's
favor and sometimes against him or her. "Character does something"
often includes this sidekick's behavior.

* "Identifiable" means assessing how the players treat one another
during the process, socially.

From my essay "GNS and related matters of role-playing theory"
([19]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/):

Narrativist Premises focus on producing Theme via events during play.
Theme is defined as a value-judgment or point that may be inferred from
the in-game events. My thoughts on Narrativist Premise are derived from
the book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, specifically his
emphasis on the questions that arise from human conundrums and passions of
all sorts.

* Is the life of a friend worth the safety of a community?

* Does love and marriage override one's loyalty to a political cause?

* And many, many more - the full range of literature, myth, and stories
of all sorts.

Narrativist Premises vary regarding their origins: character-driven
Premise vs. setting-driven Premise, for instance. They also vary a great
deal in terms of unpredictable "shifts" of events during play. The key to
Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that
engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is
produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by
pre-planning.

* A possible Narrativist development of the "vampire" initial Premise,
with a strong character emphasis, might be, Is it right to sustain
one's immortality by killing others? When might the justification
break down?

* Another, with a strong setting emphasis, might be, Vampires are
divided between ruthlessly exploiting and lovingly nurturing living
people, and which side are you on?

I'm still saying the same thing. But now, I've returned to my earlier
usage; it's the only meaning for the term "Premise" in my model.

That bit about moral and ethical content is merely one of those
personalized clincher-phrasings that some people find helpful. It helps to
distinguish a Premise from "my guy fought a dragon, so that's a conflict,
so that's a Premise" thinking. However, if these terms bug you, then say,
"problematic human issue" instead.

Egri presents his Premises as flat statements, and I state them as
questions. Using the question form isn't changing anything about what Egri
is saying. Premise must pose a question to the real people, creator and
audience alike. The fictional character's belief in something like
"Freedom is worth any price" is already an implicit question: "Is it
really? Even when [insert Situation]?" Otherwise it will fail to engage
anyone.

Egri's statement-construction is very useful for the single author faced
with a blank sheet of paper, with the goal at hand being a finished
script. The audience will see the play, not the process of creation.
However, in the role-playing medium, not only are there multiple authors,
but the audience is also composed of these same authors, and their
appreciation of the material occurs simultaneously with the significant
creative decisions. Therefore, the Premise's imaginary resolution is up
for grabs among the group in role-playing, just as it is up for grabs
within the author's own head before the play reaches final draft. In the
latter case, the jump to "the point" is swift and hopefully certain; in
the former case, the new medium, it is anything but. I phrase it as a
question for role-playing, to indicate that everyone involved has his or
her fair crack at it as one of the authors.

From Robin Laws' essay "The Literary Edge," published in Over the Edge
(Atlas Games, 1992):

OTE is, among other things, an attempt to further the development of
role-playing as art. GMs will find it fruitful to approach decisions as an
artist creating a collaborative work with players. The idea of
collaboration is important: the GM is not a "storyteller" with the players
as audience, but merely a "first among equals" given responsibility for
the smooth progress of the developing story.

... The GM is not a movie director, able to order actors to interpret a
script a given way. Instead, he should be seeking ways to challenge PCs,
to use plot development to highlight aspects of their character, in hopes
of being challenged in return.

... For years, role-players have been simulating fictional narratives the
way wargamers recreate historical military engagements. They've been
making spontaneous, democratized art for their own consumption, even if
they haven't seen it in those terms. Making the artistry conscious is a
liberating act, making it easier to emulate the classic tales that inspire
us. Have fun with it, and enjoy your special role in aesthetic history -
it's not everybody who gets to be a pioneer in the development of a new
art form.

Egri's Premise, meet role-playing. Oh, I can quibble ... instead of the
word "conscious," I prefer "mindful," and I think that "emulate the
classic tales" is a bit simplistic, but never mind. The point is, if you
want a Narrativist Manifesto from one of the great minds of role-playing,
then there you go.

Here's a bit more about that theme business. Think of it as the conclusive
"uh!" that may accompany the climax and resolution of a story. It's
uttered by the playwright as he hits a certain key or scribes a certain
sentence, by the audience members at a certain point as they view the
play, and by role-players in both capacities during the session, often
simultaneously.

From the discussion of themes in the chapter "The Art of Storytelling" in
Demon's Lair: the "God" Guide (Lasalion Games, 2002):

The theme is the idea that you wish to explore in the story. It brings
unity to the story and is explored throughout the story by the actions of
the players and the main characters. Even the obstacle or conflict that
forms the plot usually resonates with the theme. It is the thread that
ties everything together and usually teaches the players something.

Substitute Premise for theme, and theme for the "something," and that's
just about right. I especially like the implied causality: (1) the actions
of the players (2) teach the players something, which becomes non-circular
when play actually addresses Premise. Unfortunately, few other features of
Demon's Lair, including the example which follows the above text, are
consistent with this point, and most are wildly at odds with it.

More insights about theme are available in Chris Chinn's article "The
power of myth" in Daedalus #1, in which the word "theme" may be
substituted for "myth" throughout.

The other way: pastiche

What happens when you want a story but don't want to play with Story Now?
Then the story becomes a feature of Exploration with the process of play
being devoted to how to make it happen as expected. The participation of
more than one person in the process is usually a matter of providing
improvisational additions to be filtered through the primary
story-person's judgment, or of providing extensive Color to the story.
Under these circumstances, the typical result is pastiche: a story which
recapitulates an already-existing story's theme, with many explicit
references to that story.

Is pastiche necessarily bad and evil? No. Is non-pastiche necessarily
incredibly good? No.

Here's a little dialogue between me and one of the first-draft readers of
this essay:

Jesse: Now we come to a point of personal confusion. Pastiche. I still
don't get it, in any medium. If the Situation involves "...class conflict,
people being trapped by their social position, repressed romance..." and
the GM lets the players resolve it anyway they like, then how is that not
Narrativist?

Me: It is Narrativist. What you're describing is not pastiche, or more
clearly, it typically does not produce pastiche. The key is the "resolve
it any way they like" part.

Jesse: Similarly if I'm writing a story and I make a check-list of items I
feel like I "need" to include to tell the "kind of" story I want to tell,
and I have a character experience and resolve those things, then how have
I not written a new story?

Me: You have. What you're missing is that pastiche does not do this at all
- instead, it references existing works in order to re-invoke what they,
originally, provided for the reader/viewer, rather than doing it on its
own. Die Hard is an outstanding movie. Passenger 57 stinks on ice. Why?
Because Passenger 57 is only enjoyable if it reminds you, successfully, of
Die Hard. Same goes for Broken Arrow, Con Air, and a slew of similar
films. [Disclosure: I do enjoy many of these films, on the basis of the
"reminder" alone. - RE]

And it's not a matter of "who does it first." Die Hard works because it
nails its Premise, with the explosions and one-liners all being supportive
of that goal. The other movies fail to provide Premise of their own,
merely using the explosions and one-liners to remind you of Die Hard, and
by (putative) extension, tapping into Die Hard's Premise through
association alone.

Jesse: I guess I'm having trouble resolving a couple of things. Either I
can't imagine the items listed above being included in the absence of
Premise or I'm too stuck on the idea that there's nothing new under the
sun. I mean how many romantic comedies are written off the premise, "true
love can only be found by putting aside petty differences." Are you saying
that 90% of romantic comedies are just pastiche? And if you are saying
that, then aren't you putting kind of a tall order up if for something to
be Narrativist it has to say something totally unique that no one has ever
said before?

Huh, I just noticed that I did shift focus from repetition of elements
that express a Premise to repetition of Premise itself, so maybe that has
something to do with my confusion.

Me: Yes, it does. With any luck my text above has helped. It's not the
"new-ness" of the Premise or theme, it's its presence and power in the
particular story. Pastiche has no such presence or power, just reminders
of them in other stories through common motifs. Many romantic comedies are
indeed pastiche (some of them quite clever), but a certain number of them
are not - and whether they say the same thing as, say, Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes or The Devil and Miss Jones is irrelevant. The point is whether
they as self-contained stories actually do say it, or anything at all.

Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and
Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems
embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific
outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be
included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they
can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism
and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.

My final point for this issue is that creating pastiche is primarily a
form of fandom, pure homage to an existing body of work. Most High Concept
Simulationist play gravitates toward it, and some game texts are
explicitly about nothing else.

Issues on the table

I submit that playing in the Narrativist mode is just as intuitive and
instantly understood by most people as Gamist play. Not everyone agrees.

Two sources of resistance and confusion

The most difficult aspect of writing this essay is the presence of two
distinct problematic audiences, neither of which I realized existed when I
first wrote System Does Matter ([20]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1).
- Role-players who greatly value the story quality of their transcripts,
but don't play Narrativist to make them. It's often painful for them to
be, as they see it, relegated to Simulationist play (usually Exploration
of Situation). "We create stories too, dammit!" - Role-players who play
Narrativist already, but who think what I'm describing must be harder or
more abstract than it is. Since they can identify Exploration of Character
and Situation in their play preferences, they think they must be playing
Simulationist. "That's Narrativist? But we do that, using a plain old
well-known role-playing game - it can't be Narrativist!"

The first problem these audiences pose for me is that any point, example,
or clarification I make that's specific to one of them is automatically
misleading for the other.

The second problem is that, when I say Not Narrativist to the first, and
when the second mistakenly says Not Narrativist to me, then Narrativism as
a label gets misconstrued as "how Ron himself plays."

I can't afford giving special consideration to these outlooks in this
essay. Otherwise I'd have to write three separate essays, two of them
piece-by-piece dismantling the respective bugaboos, and one "everyone else
essay." I've decided to reserve the customized discussions for the on-line
forums.

What it ain't

The following misunderstandings only arise from exposure to the
role-playing subculture, as distinct from the activity. I'll have more to
say about that later in the essay.

1. The so-called Storyteller rules-set is not especially, nor even
partly, facilitative toward Narrativist play. Furthermore, I have
observed only a decided minority of White Wolf play that can be called
Narrativist, usually involving considerable rules-Drift.

2 (related). Adhering to published metaplot which is intended to surprise
and involve players in tandem with their characters, or any similar
one-hand-on-rudder for the crucial story decisions, will not facilitate
Narrativist play.

1. The number of textual rules involved, as well as how much the rules
must be consulted during play, are irrelevant. "Narrativist? Must be
rules-light!" is just one of those little humps to get over.

2. Focusing on single Techniques to define Narrativism will not yield
understanding. For instance, Drama resolution is not in and of itself
Narrativist. Nor are the common use of improvisation, trading of
narration, and overt Director stance, in and of themselves,
Narrativist play.

3. Issues of "consciousness" in terms of Premise are collectively a
complete red herring. People daily address Premise without
self-reflecting, both as audience and authors. There's no special need
to say to one another, "This is the Premise" in order to be playing
Narrativist. Laws' term "conscious" and my "mindful" only refer to the
attention to and social reinforcement of the process - not to
self-analytical or abstract discussion about the content.

4. Narrativist play doesn't force a "separation" from the imaginative
commitment to the role-playing. As the whole medium of Creative Agenda
is Exploration, you don't have to diminish Exploration at all during
Narrativist play. It is instead focused and heightened as the
mechanism for addressing Premise.

5. Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables.
The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point,
not whether the point is deep.

Fundamental Techniques

People's creative roles: what you do

Narrativist play makes special use of the general role-playing principle
that the participants are simultaneously authors and audience. The common
metaphor of improvisational jazz applies quite well, better than any other
medium-comparison. "Entertainment," in role-playing in general and in
Narrativist play especially, does not flow from playwright to script to
production team to audience. Instead, the shared-imagining act = the
shared-performance act = the entertainment = the audience feedback.

Role-playing texts are consistently very confusing about how conflicts and
resolutions are established in play, especially in games whose mechanics
and some features of their instructions suggest Narrativist play. "Prep
and plan carefully! But story never goes as planned, so be ready to change
and improvise!" What's that supposed to mean, from a Narrativist
perspective?

I grappled with this in my own work - from the chapter "Fantastic
Adventure" in Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron Edwards):

The doctrine for Sorcerer & Sword relies ... on the following idea: -
Playing this game, for all concerned, means creating stories about one or
more heroic protagonists. - The player produces the protagonist's
decisions and thus directly creates the story. - The GM makes it possible
for such play to occur, and therefore has great power over events in the
game world. However, he or she does not determine the protagonists'
actions, and must fully respond to those actions when they do occur.

Therefore, the GM cannot be considered "the narrator" or "the storyteller"
in any way, shape, or form. Such an entity exists as the outcome of the
GM-player interface and continuing creativity. His or her arbitrative role
in game events, as well as most of the Director power over time and space,
do remain. But the purpose of that role is inspiring and facilitating, not
dictating.

That text is specific to Sorcerer, so it needs expanding into what the
term "GM" means in the first place, and how the answer is subordinate to
Creative Agenda - and in fact, is nothing more nor less than a Techniques
question for role-playing in general.

I suggest that considering "the GM" to be either (a) necessarily one
person or (b) a specific and universally-consistent role is badly mistaken
- we are really talking about a set of potential behaviors (roles, tasks,
whatever) which may be independently centralized within or distributed
across a group of people. Here are some of those GM behaviors, roles, and
tasks: - rules-applier and interpreter, as in "referee" - in-game-world
time manager - changer of scenes - color provider - ensurer of protagonist
screen time - regulator of pacing (in real time) - authority over what
information can be acted upon by which characters - authority over
internal plausibility - "where the buck stops" in terms of establishing
the Explorative content - social manager of who gets to speak when

A given role-playing experience must have these things - there is no such
thing as "GM-less" play. But which of these require(s) enforcing varies
greatly, as does whether they are concentrated into a particular person,
and as does whether that person is openly acknowledged as such. What
matters for Narrativist play, however, isn't any specific point in the
diversity-matrix of these variables - it's about what the person (or
persons) currently in the GM-role is responsible for.

From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1997, author is Christian Aldridge):

Narrative Tools

... The whole premise of role-playing is the freedom the players have to
take their characters in whatever direction they want. It is important to
maintain this free will, and not lead the players with a heavy hand down a
course only the narrator controls. Though the narrator may tell a good
story, it loses the rich creative spirit of role-playing if the players
have little say in what happens.

Putting aside the synecdoche ("the whole premise," etc), two key features
show up in this passage as well as in the whole of the Maelstrom game
text. (1) No mention is made whatever of seeming to grant player control -
it's real freedom he's talking about. (2) The freedom is specifically over
what the character thinks is right and decides to do: the goal he or she
brings into the current imaginary situation. The GM ("narrator" in this
case) cannot wield any authority over what the characters are supposed to
want, which therefore extends to a similar lack of authority over how any
conflict during play is supposed to turn out.

From Christopher Kubasik's Interactive Toolkit series of essays (1995,
originally published in White Wolf Inphobia #50-53):

So, what are the differences between roleplaying games and Story
Entertainments? Let's start with roleplaying's GM (referee, Storyteller,
or whatever). This is usually the person who works out the plot, the world
and everything that isn't the players'. To a greater or lesser degree, she
is above the other players in importance, depending on the group's
temperament. In a Story Entertainment, she is just another player.
Distinctly different, but no more and no less than any other player. The
terms GM and referee fail to convey this spirit of equality. The term
Storyteller suggests that the players are passive listeners of her tale.
So here's another term for this participant - one that invokes the spirit
of Story Entertainment - Fifth Business.

Fifth Business is a term that originates from European opera companies. A
character from Robertson Davies' novel, ... Fifth Business, describes the
term this way:

"You cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a
baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business. You must have
a Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's
birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is
lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of
someone's death, if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the
tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the
spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without the Fifth
Business!"

This certainly sounds like the GM, but it also makes it clear that he's
part of the show, not the show itself.

Let's call the players Leads. They're not players in the GM's game.
They're participants in a story. The Fifth Business has a lot more work to
do than do the Leads, changing costumes and shaping the story while it's
in progress. But the Leads are equal to the Fifth Business. The Leads must
react to the characters, incidents, and information that the Fifth
Business offers, just as players must react to what the GM offers in a
roleplaying game. But the Fifth Business must always be on his toes and
react to what the Leads offer.

... The Fifth Business can't decide what the plot is going to be and then
run the players through it like mice in a maze. The Leads determine the
direction of the story when they create their characters ... What do the
characters want? What are their goals? The story is about their attempt to
gain those goals. The Fifth Business creates obstacles to those goals.

[From Part 3, "Character, character, character"]

As the designer of the character you shouldn't simply depend on the Fifth
Business ... to provide you with trouble. You should look for trouble for
your character. ...

Moreover, you know best of all what kind of problems you want for your
character. ... in a story entertainment you're not the passive passenger
in the gamemaster's roller coaster. You are a co-creator with Fifth
Business and the other players of a story.

[From Part 4, "Running Story Entertainments"]

Listen to the players, keep in mind the idea of obstacles, mix up volatile
characters and objects, and remember you don't have to know where you're
going. No roleplaying game ever follows the "path" of the story anyway, so
a story entertainment just dismisses the whole notion of adventure. Rather
than become frustrated when the characters don't do what they're supposed
to, let them lead the story with their Characters' Goals.

It all comes down to this: a "player" in a Narrativist role-playing
context necessarily makes the thematic choices for a given
player-character. Even if this role switches around from person to person
(as in Universalis), it's always sacrosanct in the moment of decision.
"GMing," then, for this sort of play, is all about facilitating another
person's ability to do this.

Protagonism

In all role-playing, the player-character is the lens of the Creative
Agenda at work. That's right, I said all role-playing.

* Simulationist = the character "fits" - its setting, capabilities,
outcomes, behavior patterns, and so on, all reinforce the Dream for
everyone.

* Gamist = the character is a direct opportunity for player-strategy.
Its construction doesn't hamstring the player (except with agreed-upon
handicaps) and permits him or her to Step On Up.

* Narrativist = the character's predicament is how Premise is seen/felt
in full, and what he does, and what happens is how a theme is
realized.

By definition, a character faces "relevant stress" for the Creative
Agenda. The term used most often for that is "adversity," and it is
required in all three modes of play. Without it, there is no Situation.
Without Situation, there's no role-playing, just sitting around and
diddling. You can tell when this happens: everyone stops paying attention
to one another, and quite likely the one person talking is only paying
attention to himself or herself. Adversity, which may come from any
participant during play, is the key.

Now we run into a conceptual tangle. In literary terms, if there's a
story, there's one or more protagonists. Since story can arise from any
sort of role-playing, then protagonism of the relevant character comes
with that, part and parcel. However, "protagonism" at the Forge as
discussed most frequently by Paul Czege, tends to focus on very specific
processes of play: those which prompt Premise-addressing interest in a
given character among all of the real-person participants; in other words,
a specifically Narrativist process.

That's a real terminological conundrum. I shudder at the thought of
co-opting the term "protagonist" into anything besides the fictional
context of a story, regardless of how it was produced. However, I also
want to preserve Paul's point that people may establish emotional,
relatively high-stakes connections to other people's player-characters.
But neither are restricted to Narrativist play.

Fortunately, for discussing Narrativist play by itself, the two things are
one and the same. Which means I shall happily relegate debate about the
term in a larger (all of role-playing) sense to the forums and neatly
dodge it for purposes of the essay.

So let's talk about Narrativist protagonism and how it's established,
starting with the adversity. From Sorcerer (Adept Press, 2001, author is
Ron Edwards):

GET TO THE BANGS!

Bangs are those moments when the characters realize they have a problem
right now and have to get moving to deal with it. It can be as simple as a
hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the
characters or as subtle as the voice of the long-dead murder victim
answering when they call the number they found in the new murder victim's
pockets.

But that needed clarifying, so from Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001,
author is Ron Edwards):

Driving with Bangs ... how is the poor GM able to assure any happenings
when he or she is no longer the primary author?

... It is the GM's job to present and, for lack of a better word, drive
Bangs, in the sense of driving a nail or driving something home. In
narrative terms, Bangs tend to come as one of the following: [list follows
with details; to summarize: crisis to crisis, twist to twist, link to
link, locale to locale - RE]

Ultimately, all of these elements provided by the GM are the same thing: a
means for moving from decision to decision on the part of the players.
Bangs are always about player-character responses.

This is why Bangs are not represented by many of the fight scenes or clues
in traditional role-playing. Throwing mad hyenas at the player-characters
is not a Bang if the only result of the fight is to wander into the next
room. Nor is a clue a Bang at all if all it does is show where the next
clue may be found. A real Bang gives the player options and requires his
or her decision about how to handle it, which in turn reveals and develops
the player-character as a hero.

In Sex & Sorcery (2003), I presented some further terms to represent
multiple-person input and some other nuances into the Bang concept: Bobs,
Weavings, Crosses, and Openings; all are listed in the glossary following
this essay.

Aside from a lack of adversity, the other issue regarding protagonism is
the problem of de-protagonizing, a term coined by Paul Czege.
Deprotagonizing literally means to deprive a person of the means to
express one of the bulleted points above (depending on the Creative Agenda
at hand; Paul is usually discussing Narrativist play). There are dozens of
ways to do that, and all of them are grounds for instant breaking of the
Social Contract for that play-experience. No one accepts deprotagonization
willingly; those bulleted points are heartfelt priorities at the very core
of Creative Agenda. As a minor but thought-provoking point, character
death is not deprotagonizing if it satisfies the Creative Agenda for that
person and group.

Nearly all of the dysfunctional issues described later in the essay
concern deprotagonizing in the context of Narrativist play, which is best
defined as Force: the final authority that any person who is not playing a
particular player-character has over decisions and actions made by that
player-character. This is distinct from information that the GM imparts or
chooses not to impart to play; I'm talking about the protagonists'
decisions and actions. In Narrativist play, using Force by definition
disrupts the Creative Agenda.

Force techniques include IIEE manipulation, fudged/ignored rolls,
perception management, clue moving, scene framing as a form of reducing
options, directions as to character's actions using voiced and unvoiced
signals, modifying features of various NPCs during play, and authority
over using textual rules. The Golden Rule of White Wolf games is, in
application, a mandate for Force.

Force Techniques often include permitting pseudo-decisions, which we can
discuss at the Forge if necessary. Also, Force Techniques do vary in how
flexible a scene's outcome is permitted to be. Some GMs (to use the
classic single-GM context) might do anything up to actually picking up
your dice for you in order for you to talk to "that guy," or he might let
the characters miss the clue, either 'porting it to another character or
letting its absence go ahead and affect the outcome.

System - "it does matter" all over again

Remember the System "bow" which shoots the Creative Agenda arrow? It must
be an active tool. The Explorative Situation must change with verve -
anything that introduces ebbs, flows, and unpredictable elements into the
real-person decision-making process. That's what System does, whether it's
composed entirely of dialogue or relies on pages and pages of probability
charts. How does it do it? Through the combinations of Techniques being
employed.

I'll focus on one bit of System: resolution. I'll break it up into
Techniques regarding what exactly is being resolved. For Narrativist play,
the key is to focus on conflicts rather than tasks. A conflict statement
is, "I'm trying to kill him," or, "I'm trying to humiliate him," whereas a
task statement is, "I swing my sword at him." (It doesn't matter, by the
way, how much in-game time and space are involved; conflict resolution can
be "very small" and task resolution can be "very big." We can discuss this
more on-line.) I submit that trying to resolve conflicts by hoping that
the accumulated successful tasks will turn out to be about what you want,
is an unreliable and unsatisfying way to role-play when developing
Narrativist protagonism.

How does this relate to game mechanics? I'll take the most-common example
of Fortune systems. The big distinction I want to make is between
Fortune-in-the-Middle and the more commonly-understood Fortune-at-the-End.
For the record, I think both go back to the very beginning of
role-playing; I didn't invent anything by naming them.

Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are
known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into
action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for
resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The
announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to
have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into
motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through
figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be
left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out. Let's say
a character with a sword attacks some guy with a spear. The point is to
announce the character's basic approach and intent, and then to roll. A
missed roll in this situation tells us the goal failed. Now the group is
open to discussing just how it happened from the beginning of the action
being initiated. Usually, instead of the typical description that you
"swing and miss," because the "swing" was assumed to be in action before
the dice could be rolled at all, the narration now can be anything from
"the guy holds you off from striking range with the spearpoint" to "your
swing is dead-on but you slip a bit." Or it could be a plain vanilla miss
because the guy's better than you. The point is that the narration of what
happens "reaches back" to the initation of the action, not just the
action's final micro-second.

There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict
and task. At one end, the task does fail, but the goal fails too, perhaps
with a nuance or two. The other end is much wider in interpretative scope:
we know the character's goal (killing some guy) doesn't happen, but with
those in place, narration takes over to provide all the events involved.
Applying different judgments along this spectrum, for different parts of
play, is a big deal in games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Sorcerer, and
HeroQuest. In Sorcerer, failing a dice roll means failing the goal, almost
always due to failing at the task; in Dust Devils, certain card outcomes
dictate that you fail at the goal, but whether the task failed or
succeeded within that context is entirely up for grabs and determined by
that scene's designated narrator. HeroQuest and Trollbabe permit the group
to customize between these extremes as they see fit for that scene.

Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates
Narrativist play in a number of ways.

* It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the
moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent
goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel
fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too.

* It permits tension to be managed from conflict to conflict and from
scene to scene. So a "roll to hit" in Scene A is the same as in Scene
B in terms of whether the target takes damage, but it's not the same
in terms of the acting character's motions, intentions, and experience
of the action.

* It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or
whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens
in tandem with the real-people statements.

Not all versions of this principle are alike. Some of them involve
scene-scale resolution (Story Engine), some involve narration-trading
(Dust Devils), some are heavily integrated with tactics (The Riddle of
Steel), and some of them require role-playing "bits" to justify
incorporating system features (The Dying Earth).

Some Fortune-in-the-Middle applications give opportunities for tweaking
after the roll: usually, spending points of some kind after the dice have
hit the table to alter the effects. Some games have this feature and some
don't; Forge jargon calls such things "FitM with teeth" because such a
system forces the group to acknowledge that the dice do not "finish" the
job of resolution.

Does Fortune-in-the-Middle define Narrativism? No, nor does it even
facilitate it in isolation. It's merely a strong component of many
Narrativist-facilitating combinations of Techniques; I've left its
potential integration with reward and behavioral mechanics out of this
discussion.

Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far
indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see
discussions at the Forge of Human Wreckage and The World the Flesh and the
Devil.

Is Fortune the only resolution method for conflict resolution? The answer
is emphatically no. The two main alternatives are apparently Karma +
Resource management, which I consider to be underdeveloped at this point,
and highly-structured Drama, which may be investigated through Puppetland,
Soap, and to a lesser extent Universalis.

The game world

Since Exploration is best understood as a medium and tool in Narrativist
play, rather than a product itself, the role of "in game reality" needs
some review - not so much about who has authority over it (the usual
concern in Simulationist play), but what the heck it is. The answer is,
it's a medium and tool for addressing Premise, and nothing more at all.

From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1994, author is Christian Aldridge):

Literal vs. Conceptual

A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the
scene, instead of literalisms. ... focus on the intent behind the scene
and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the
task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in
terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm
spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the
danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates
the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It
is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how
hard the feat is for the character. ... If the players enjoy the challenge
of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed
the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the
narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.

The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the
character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table
and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump
over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.

The "doesn't interfere" matches to my "prioritization." The "narrative
flow and enjoyment" matches to addressing Premise. The "whole point of the
story" and "intent behind the scene" are Premise itself, expressed in this
scene as a Bang. More topically, I can think of no better text to explain
the vast difference between playing the games RuneQuest and HeroQuest.

Stance

A lot of mental sweat has been shed to try to link Stances with modes and
goals of play. I think most of that discussion was misguided by an overly
1:1 approach. In my big model as currently constructed, only combinations
of Ephemera comprise a Technique, so we're not talking about one Stance in
a given moment, but the distribution of Stances through multiple character
actions, decisions, and scenes. And that's only one Technique, which is
not enough to dictate or identify Creative Agenda.

Bearing all that in mind, Author Stance may be considered the default for
Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere.
Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does
it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only
requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play
is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the
player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for
what that character does.

Narration the non-issue

Before going on, I'll take a quick break to discuss "narration," which is
no more and no less than saying what happens in the imaginary events. I
want to distinguish saying what happens (narrating) from establishing what
happens (currently a non-named concept), because they are often confused.
I'm taking the

I'll break it down.

* Narration is not a Drama mechanic unless it is literally the means of
resolution.

* Narration is in practice shared among members of a role-playing group
and far less centralized than most people think.

The only concern about narration per se is that its relationship to
establishing-what-happens must be clear. That entails that how things are
established is itself clear: is it ad-lib? is the GM where the buck stops?
is it traded about, organized in any way? or what? Those are good
questions, but once they're established, narration is a no-brainer.

Game texts are typically astonishingly bad at explaining this issue.
Positive exceptions for Narrativist-leaning games include Soap, The Pool,
and Universalis, and other recent games like InSpectres, Otherkind, Dust
Devils, Trollbabe, and Donjon, which all distribute narration around the
group as a means of distributing who establishes what.

Historical diversity of Narrativist play

Narrativist play-procedures are pretty scattered in terms of actual game
books. I suggest that titles and texts are really just rustles in the
bushes, such that one has to infer the actual play that either informed
them or might have proceeded from them. For most of what follows, I've
spoken with game designers and many, many play-groups about these issues.

I think that Narrativist play goes back to the beginning of role-playing.
Yes, a "non-Narrativism" shroud descended over role-playing design and
publishing, but I think that dates from the mid-late 1980s. In other
words, the "Narrativist revolution" of 2000-2003 is not an innovation, but
a return to a lost art.

Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to
Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some
Tunnels & Trolls, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". I also recommend
reading and playing Marvel Super Heroes, reviewing the entire Strike Force
text in light of the 1st and 2nd editions of Champions being used by that
group, reviewing the extensive documentation of Champions play presented
in the APA-zine The Clobberin Times', and giving Toon, Ghostbusters, and
James Bond a try. I am not saying "These are Narrativist games," but
rather, evidence supports the claim that these rules-sets supported some
Narrativist play back then.

I do not think that the strong minority trend beginning in the very late
1980s toward Drama-heavy role-playing represented by Amber, Theatrix, and
The Window was especially Narrativist in application, although that mode
of play was probably found in some groups playing these games. This trend
is better understood in combination with games like Fudge and Risus, and
most especially in terms of the Mind's Eye Theatre approach to LARPs.

During the early 1990s, however, a certain approach to numbers and Fortune
became apparent across a number of games: Prince Valiant, Over the Edge
(especially in light of Laws' essay), Castle Falkenstein, Everway,
Maelstrom/Story Engine, Zero, and The Whispering Vault. Later, similar
games include Sorcerer, Orkworld, and The Riddle of Steel. All of these
texts demonstrate an internal struggle to articulate means of addressing
Premise, littered with trip-ups based on assumptions of GM-power and the
utter lack of precedent in explaining the whole idea. Some of them slammed
toward Simulationist texts upon second-edition revision and via
supplements, probably to make it "more like an RPG."

The internet revealed something vastly more startling: in-your-nose
Narrativist designs like Ghost Light, Soap, InSpectres, and The Pool, as
well as their Gamist cousin Elfs. These games' influence was vast at the
Forge, including but not limited to Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Otherkind,
Paladin, Violence Future, My Life with Master, and Universalis, along with
further Gamist cousins like Donjon. The internet also revealed active
play-communities that had previously been invisible to store-centered
commerce, including Marvel Super Heroes among others.

Since the historical trends are so textually diffuse, I think that this
section will do better to focus on procedural diversity, small point by
small point. Each point presents a separate and independent spectrum of
variation. As always, game titles are used only to refer to the actual
play that they best seem to facilitate.

Basic diversity of Narrativist play

Making it up in play vs. setting it up beforehand

A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for
"making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional
for Narrativist play, but it is indeed an important issue for role-playing
of any kind. So it's not a bad idea simply to ask, for a given group or
session, when and how is the Explorative context (setting, situation,
whatever) established?

* High improvisation during play: e.g., Universalis, InSpectres, Extreme
Vengeance

* Rock steady based on preparation - Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein,
HeroQuest, Sorcerer

* In between - Trollbabe, The Pool, Dust Devils, My Life with Master

Many people get unnecessarily hung up on this issue ... playing
Universalis is not "more Narrativist" than playing Orkworld, for instance.
Also, this issue is not at all correlated with centralizing vs.
distributing the various GM-tasks discussed previously.

Where little Premises come from

Given that Explorative content for Narrativist play exists to provide meat
for addressing a Premise, it shouldn't be surprising that differing
starting points for the process can be found depending on what kind of
details and efforts are involved in preparing for play.

Just as in Gamist play, the big gorilla of the five Explorative elements
is Situation. What I'm contrasting here is which elements begin detailed
enough to yield Situation relatively quickly during play, as opposed to
which ones can be "relaxed" in terms of detail and depth at the start, to
be developed later.

* Character-based Premise: Characters begin play with at least one
significant Premise-based decision in their backgrounds.

* Setting-based Premise: External adversity swarms upon the characters
based on unavoidable, often large-scale elements of the overall
setting.

* Situation-based Premise: The immediate conflict at hand is already
under way and rich with Premise; fill in Character goals and Setting
justification as needed during play.

I suggest that it's useful to reduce the pre-play effort on the other
elements involved. Loading too many of them with Premise prior to play
yields a messy and unworkable play-situation in Narrativist terms, in
which characters' drives and external adversity are too full to develop
off of or to reinforce one another. More discussion and debate about this
issue may be taken up at the Forge.

Character-based Premise is the easiest to implement, and unsurprisingly it
reflects Egri's ideas in full. Games whose design relies on this approach
include Zero, Sorcerer, Dust Devils, and The Riddle of Steel, among many
others. I think this form of Premise-building is probably the most common
form of Drifting to Narrativist play. From the "Campaigning" chapter and
"The Developing Campaign" section in Strike Force (Hero Games, 1988,
author is Aaron Allston):

THE "CHARACTER STORY"

One thing that each Champions GM needs to learn to do is to spot,
carefully nurture, and eventually play out the "Character Story."

Each player-character has a Story above and beyond the ordinary adventures
encountered during the course of the campaign. This Character Story
usually involves the resolution of the most important desires of the
character.

Phosphene - Discovery of and Acceptance by Family. Raised by a single
parent and knowing of no other relatives, Phos started his career cynical
and alone. Learning that he had a family, the enigmatic Brood, he
discovered that he had a tremendous need to become one of them. Eventually
he met all his surviving relatives and earned the affection of most of
them. Now married and a family man himself, his personal story is
resolved.

Lorelei - Growth into Womanhood. In the course of her years of playing,
Lorelei grew from a 15-year-old innocent into a mature woman and team
leader; the most important elements of transition (other than the years
involved) were her romance with Commodore and her eventual rescue of and
reunion with her father.

Take a look at your own character - or at all the PCs if you're the GM -
and try to root out the Character Story of each one. [examples follow -
RE] In short, try to figure out what element of the character's
background, relations, or psychology make him interesting but will
eventually make him (or his player) frustrated and unhappy if not
ultimately resolved. That's the Character Story.

An interesting qualifier shows up in the final paragraph of this section:

Of course, no campaign lasts long enough for every Character Story to be
discovered and exploited ...

... which I think is a bizarre statement, possibly related to the idea
(which I remember all too well) that Champions players should all
cooperate to preserve the group regardless of their differing goals during
play.

The final section in this chapter indicates, I think the key point - which
is only presented parenthetically in the earlier text (above - "or his
player").

LISTENING TO YOUR PLAYERS

Always listen to your players' discussion of the ongoing adventure.
They'll constantly be analyzing, theorizing, and commenting on the
adventure. Often, their discussion will give you even better ideas than
those you've been implementing.

Also, pay attention to the recurring phrase, "It might be neat if ..." The
player who is saying this, whether he realizes it or not, is expressing a
desire about a future storyline or character development. Usually it's
easy to accomodate him, and gives him a more personal interest in that
specific plotline.

I consider this important because it acknowledges that the developing
Premise is best recognized by the people who play the protagonists.

Setting-based Premise is a bit more developmental, usually involving
"someone else's problem" or an overriding external adversity of some kind
- zombie attack being perhaps the most basic example. It might actually be
a bit better for introducing Simulationist-by-habit players to Narrativist
play, as they can start with sketchy characters and grow into addressing a
pretty-well-defined Premise over time. From HeroQuest (Issaries Inc, 2003,
primary text author is Greg Stafford):

Make Your Own Part

All heroes are extraordinary and destined for some fame in the world of
Glorantha. This is guaranteed, since they are individually guided by a
higher power: you, the player.

Your heroes will have the chance to be involved in the great events of the
Hero Wars, such as [several colorful examples - RE]. Such events are not
only for the super-powerful; they require the participation of your hero
at whatever level of power he has achieved.

[just past halfway through the book - RE]

Drama

Drama in Glorantha often comes from the conflict between what is and what
ought to be. Living up to expectations of cult behavior, for instance, is
meant to be difficult and limiting. After all, religious requirements are
not human ideals. [Wow! Talk about an Egri Premise! - RE] The intensity of
the plot comes from the hero trying to fulfil these expectations while
living with the everyday temptations and complications of life: a cow is
missing, some of your clan died in a raid, your children are ominously
ill, or neighbors are poaching the hunting lands. Add to this the
imperative of the Hero Wars, where some things will happen no matter what
the heroes do, and the heroes have to make difficult choices about what to
do and who [sic] to aid.

[and near the end - RE]

Politics, Always Politics

Glorantha may be a world of magic and myth, but there are some human
constants that remain, not the least of which is politics. [examples
follow of politics both as rivalries and means to social authority and
respect - RE]

The Hero Wars are breaking upon Glorantha. On the one hand, they are
throwing old alliances into question, tearing established communities
apart, and raising new dilemmas for leaders and led alike. But they are
also creating new and unexpected communities, as rivals are forced into
partnership by new threats or novel opportunities.

I don't think I've ever seen a more challenging Premise in a role-playing
text than "religious requirements are not human ideals." That is HeroQuest
in a nutshell, and there is no avoiding it during play. A character may
begin as just another goat-herder, but he isn't going to stay that way.
Other games with similar origins of Premise include Castle Falkenstein and
My Life with Master, in which the Master is, for all intents and purposes,
the setting.

Situation-based Premise is perhaps the easiest to manage as GM, as
player-characters are well-defined and shallow, and the setting is vague
although potentially quite colorful. The Premise has little to do with
either in the long-term; it's localized to a given moment of conflict.
Play often proceeds from one small-scale conflict to another,
episodically. Good examples of games based on this idea include Prince
Valiant, The Dying Earth, and InSpectres. From The Dying Earth (2001,
Pelgrane Press, authors are Robin Laws, John Snead, and Peter Freeman):

Many Dying Earth stories revolve around a closed community, which may be
either a small settlement or an isolated workplace. In its isolation, it
has developed its own highly-structured, sometimes legalistic, always
peculiar rules. Without outside influence, and with the stout enforcement
of its codes, the group has survived for a long time. When the protagonist
arrives, the locals try to enforce the rules on him, assimilating him into
their bizarre system. Instead, the hero ... takes action which utterly
disrupts the delicately-balanced harmony of the community. ... the
community, the basis of its rules destroyed, collapses.

[now for play]

When creating an adventure, dream up a bizarre rule or activity on which a
community's existence depends. Figure out at least one way in which the
PCs could wreak havoc on the community by disrupting the activity or
subverting the rule.

Then create a reason for the PCs to do so ... [actually, the entire
character creation process for this game takes care of this detail - RE]

The point is that the Situation doesn't have any particular role or
importance to the Setting, either in terms of where it comes from or what
happens later. The setting can be quite vague and might even just be a
gray haze that characters are presumed to have travelled through in order
to have encountered this new Situation.

This type of Premise does carry some risks: (1) the possibility of a
certain repetition from event to event, but probably nothing that you
wouldn't find in other situation-first narrative media, which is to say
serial fiction of any kind; (2) the heightened possibility of producing
pastiche; and (3) the heightened possibility of shifting to Gamist play.

Deep diversity

Who gets the GM jobs

Earlier, I listed some of the various roles and tasks usually associated
with the term "GM." As I said, the question is not whether there is a GM
(there is always one or more for any scene during play), but rather how
the GMing tasks are distributed. The potential range of diversity is
staggering. The most important variables include: - Which of these roles
are most important to be formalized for this game - Whether the roles are
centralized in one person - The concept of "the buck" - in the event that
different people suggest different things, who says what goes

In the interest of space and keeping the complexity of these sections
limited, I'll only provide examples for the centralization-issue. -
Centralized: The Riddle of Steel, Sorcerer, Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein,
HeroQuest, The Dying Earth - Widely distributed: Universalis, Soap - In
between: Trollbabe, The Pool, InSpectres, Dust Devils, Violence Future

Story structure

Classically, a story has the following structure: (a) introduce character
and situation, (b) introduce conflict, (c) rising conflict, (d) climax,
and (e) resolution, of which (a, b, d) are the key pieces. Most stories
indeed follow this model regardless of their chronological presentation,
point-of-view, or any other details. There's usually no particular worry
that Narrativist play will fail to produce a story (of whatever quality),
without any overt effort to force it. However, it is also at least
possible for overall story structure to be part of System.

Sorcerer presented the Kicker Technique, which is to say, a
player-authored Bang included in character creation, giving the GM
responsibility to make it central to play. It may be considered the
precise opposite of the "character hook" concept presented in many
adventure scenarios and role-playing games.

Some recent games feature the Endgame concept: a status for a character
(and sometimes all characters) that signals "Now is really Now," and it's
time for Premise to become theme without dilly-dallying. I suppose it can
first be seen in Soap and Puppetland based on these games' explicit
real-time constraints, but it's also embedded in the Guts/Coincidence
mechanics in Extreme Vengeance, the "Schism" version of Humanity in
Sorcerer, and the Insight mechanics in The Riddle of Steel. It's most
explicitly present in Violence Future and My Life with Master.

A similar structural issue is to decide how much Premise-addressing
(story, if you will) has already occurred before in-play decision-making
begins. At one extreme, you have "Blood Opera," which is to say, several
characters already engaged in serious committed effort to do
something-or-other, usually contradictory. Such play, regardless of how
many sessions are involved, tends to end up with several dead protagonists
and plenty of tragedy due to conflicting obligations and/or
misunderstandings; it's quite cathartic. Typically it's more satisfying
when all of the participants are enlisted in scenario preparation. At the
other extreme, you have play in which the Premise is introduced very
slowly and piecemeal, through a variety of scenes and events.

Here are some interesting trends which crop up along this spectrum:

* When the character's judgmental and active presence is established and
already in action as play begins, that beginning point is usually the
crisis-point for the story in general. Playing Legends of Alyria,
Prince Valiant, My Life with Master, and Soap tends toward this end;
all of them carry a slight danger of "over before they begin," but
they are also the most reliable for immediate Premise-consensus.

* When the Situation is well-established prior to play and essentially
independent of the player-characters, then how they encounter it and
become enlisted in its hassles is up for grabs, including when they
arrive. The protagonists usually play a catalytic role toward everyone
and everything else. Playing Everway, The Dying Earth, InSpectres,
Orkworld, The Whispering Vault, and Trollbabe is a lot like this.

* When the Situation must slowly develop into Premise, play is
necessarily extended into multiple sessions. Playing Sorcerer,
HeroQuest, Dust Devils, Violence Future, and Over the Edge often
proceeds in this fashion, to the extent that the first couple of
sessions resemble the first sections of a classical novel rather than
a movie or play, and they tend not to show off all of their most
satisfying features during single-session demonstration play.

Not all game designs must fall onto this spectrum explicitly, although
play does - I leave the different ways to place playing The Pool,
Universalis, and The Riddle of Steel onto the spectrum as an exercise for
the reader (hint: there are three answers, one for each game).

Finally, another subtle enforcer of story structure is the range of
possible focus, or specification, for player-characters' abilities. It
doesn't surprise me that many Narrativist-facilitating game designs don't
distinguish very much among player-characters' abilities (Sorcerer, The
Dying Earth, and My Life with Master characters are all pretty much alike
within each game, mechanically); when they are so distinguished, however,
the differences tend to lock down the range of the potential Premise(s)
during play.

So the most constrained story-structure game design would include Endgame
mechanics, an almost-over Situation, and strongly-distinguished abilties
(and hence story-roles) among the protagonists; interestingly, I can think
of no RPG design which features all three.

Resolution and reward mechanics

For Narrativist play, character creation may be considered the first step
in or the chassis for the reward and character-change systems. It differs
from the similar principle in Gamism in that personal strategy is not an
issue, but rather personal emotional agenda about the Premise. What's
interesting is that when play includes a focused reward system in
Narrativist terms, its numbers and effects are always integrated directly
into the event-resolution system.

One whole category of play, however, does not provide any special
connection between the two and usually doesn't include much of a reward
system at all. Earlier games of this sort include The Window (partly),
Theatrix, Over the Edge, Castle Falkenstein, The World the Flesh and the
Devil, and possibly Puppetland. I think Soap, InSpectres, and Universalis
represent a development in this category of stronger IIEE-structure, as
well as providing a very abstract resolution + reward mechanic, but
retaining the Drama emphasis for resolution. These games also feature
pronounced GM-sharing as distinct from the earlier ones.

The other category includes very strong reward mechanics design based on
character decisions, with resolution based on Fortune in the Middle in
order to preserve Author Stance during those decisions. Example games
include Prince Valiant, The Whispering Vault, Zero, The Pool, Sorcerer,
Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Legends of Alyria, My Life with Master, HeroQuest,
and Orkworld, as well as The Riddle of Steel in a cunning fashion.

A recent development in both categories is to bring relationships into the
game mechanics to a very high degree, as in HeroQuest, Trollbabe, and My
Life with Master. Earlier versions of this idea may be seen in Albedo,
Lace & Steel, and Pendragon, but its primarily-Narrativist application is
recent and very significant.

Character behavior mechanics

This topic is potentially rather a sore point among role-players, unless
they have experienced play which shows the diverse strong points along the
entire spectrum. It concerns how limited characters' behavior may be.

At one end of this spectrum, there's nothing of the kind: just contextual
material that prompts the issues and perhaps a character descriptor here
or there. The primary engine for Narrativist play is purely personal
fascination with the issues at hand and with working them out. Castle
Falkenstein, The Whispering Vault, and Over the Edge are good examples.

Moving just a little over, characters' behavioral descriptors are
required, but they don't have any special role in determining what the
character does - except for providing secondary bonuses to some resolution
events, as in The Pool and HeroQuest.

Moving well toward the other end of the spectrum, specific behaviors have
generalized consequence mechanics. Sorcerer, Trollbabe, Dust Devils, The
Riddle of Steel, and Orkworld are all examples - the characters have free
will regarding what to do, but immediate mechanics provide significant
effects.

Far at the other end of the spectrum, behavior is heavily structured, for
either or both character-creation and scenario-play. This kind of game
often entails playing "against yourself" for the character, and the GM is
potentially semi-adversarial, even ruthless, playing both external and
internal adversity. Examples include Wuthering Heights, Extreme Vengeance,
Violence Future, My Life with Master, Le Mon Mouri, InSpectres, Otherkind,
and The Dying Earth. "Schism", "Urge", and other sorcerer/demon
combination versions of Sorcerer effectively shift the game's play into
this category.

Procedural diversity: thematic content

Given that theme arises during Narrativist play, what does it look like,
and how limited or well-defined is it? This breaks down into three
independent issues, all of which are pretty subtle and deserve more
discussion.

1. The potential for personal risk and disclosure among the real people
involved.

* High risk play is best represented by playing Sorcerer, Le Mon
Mouri, InSpectres, Zero, or Violence Future. You're putting your
ego on the line with this stuff, as genre conventions cannot help
you; the other people in play are going to learn a lot about who
you are.

* Low risk play is best represented by playing Castle Falkenstein,
Wuthering Heights, The Dying Earth, or Prince Valiant. These
games are, for lack of a better word, "lighter" or perhaps more
whimsical - they do raise issues and may include extreme content,
but play-decisions tend to be less self-revealing.

2. The depth and profundity of the resulting themes. Counter to my lousy
phrasing in GNS and related matters of role-playing theory
([21]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), "literary merit" of a
theme is irrelevant. Themes are indeed important, and I suggest that
two broad categories are available: cathartic vs. deconstructive, with
the former splitting up into happy-ending, sad-ending, and ambiguous.
A related point concerns the range of the possible themes for a given
play-instance, from narrow to broad. I'll forego providing game
examples as the depth and range of theme rely very greatly on the
given play-group's use of the game.

3. The humorous content. This is, in many ways, a red herring. I consider
"funny" always to be a secondary phenomenon, perhaps modifying theme,
or modifying something else entirely. For GNS or other theory
purposes, you have to look at the something else and discuss that
first. Still, there are a couple of points worth mentioning for
role-playing.

* Is play itself funny, or is the topic of play funny? This is a
very complex issue, fully analogous to the endless discussions of
fear and suspense in horror role-playing.

* Is the humor acting to bring participants' emotions closer to the
Premise, or to distance them?

GNS crossover issues

I suggest that historically, two basic Creative Agendas have been
perceived for role-playing: 1. Gamist, with the sub-set of Hard Core
Gamism; 2. Simulationist, with a sub-set of
Simulationist-becomes-Narrativist.

Oh, I know, people never used the GNS terms for this purpose. But this is
how newcomers to the theory often read the terms, indicating their current
understanding, and those readings are fully consistent with the
explanations of play found in hundreds of game texts. I consider this
dichotomy, sub-sets and all, to be badly mistaken, but before I get to
that, let's take a look at its cultural results.

Over time, as I see it, many practitioners and designers correctly
realized they were playing and promoting
Simulationist-becomes-"Narrativist," in quotes. Those quotes mean,
producing stories mainly through front-loading or post-editing, not
through protagonist decision-making as run by the players. They mean
focusing on story as product as opposed to Narrativist play. Reactions to
this latter insight have varied widely, and they include:

* Abandon the perceived overall mode (Simulationism) entirely for Gamist
pastures;

* Embrace the Simulationism and drop any pretense at story-creation
through play, such that story is at most an epiphenomenon to the
Exploration, usually of Setting;

* Embrace the quotes in the "Narrativist" with verve, putting as much
effort and sophistication toward metaplot and GM-driven-story as
possible;

* Give up role-playing in disgust with the inability to produce
Narrativist play without the quotes;

* Mute down any particular Creative Agenda, making sure to provide a
little Gamist candy, in the interests of group harmony;

* Drop the quotes around the "Narrativist," which means abandoning
Simulationism as a starting point and turning to explicit Narrativism.

My construction of the modes of play is extremely different. As I see it,
one starts with [Exploration]. Now, either prioritize the intensity of
imagining some specific content as the agenda of play, which gives you
[E[Simulationism]], or develop the Exploration into a further-derived
agenda, which gives the choice of [E[Narrativism]] or [E[Gamism]].

Gamism and Narrativism

As I've tried to show at various points so far, Gamist and Narrativist
play are near-absolute social and structural equivalents, sharing the same
range for most Techniques save those involving reward systems. They differ
primarily in terms of the actual aesthetic payoff - what's appreciated
socially and aesthetically. That difference is extremely marked. Happily,
therefore very little if any chance exists for these modes of play to come
into conflict with one another - a group simply goes one way or the other.

From the Introduction section of The Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game
(Marvel Entertainment Group, 2003, "Direct Edition," authors not credited,
editor is Mark D. Beazley):

Style of Play

You can play Marvel in a variety of styles, based on whatever you're
interested in. Most roleplaying games tend to fall somewhere between two
styles of play that we call "Clobberin' Time" and "Power and
Responsibility." And for one-on-one play, there's always "Brawling," a
style unique to this game.

Power and Responsibility

... players spend a great deal of time on things like character
development, morality, thoughts and goals ... They care about the other
people in their lives, like girlfriends or boyfriends, aunts, sidekicks,
and non-Super Hero friends. ... there's more to this style of play than
busting things up.

Clobberin' Time

... players don't spend much time on their characters' lifestyles. They
concentrate on action and plenty of it.

Together, the players and the GamesMaster decide what style of game they
want to play. There is nothing more frustrating than a GamesMaster who
runs a "Power and Responsibility" style game for a bunch of "Clobberin'
Times" players. ...

Brawling

... allows players to answer age-old questions: who would win in a fight,
the Thing or the Hulk? [further examples] ... two players can sit down
with their characters and fight against each other without needing a
GamesMaster.

I can always quibble. I think the above text adheres a little too closely
to the mistaken dichotomies presented earlier, with the concomitant red
herring of combat vs. no combat. But it's flawless in terms of caring
together about what's up, and about socially constructing and reinforcing
what's up. And the key point for me is that the same game system is usable
alternatively for Narrativist or Gamist (or Hard Core Gamist) play, rather
than simultaneously. Also, the text includes very little mention of or
attention to Simulationist play per se. Enjoying "being a Marvel hero" in
this game is not Simulationist at all, but merely the foundational
Explorative expectation for either of the two focused options.

Whether the Gamist and Narrativist modes may be played "congruently" is
controversial (see Congruence in the glossary). I remain skeptical.

The grim epiphany: Narrativism and Simulationism

This section supercedes the section "El Dorado and Drift" in my essay
"Simulationism: the Right to Dream"
([22]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/).

I'll begin by identifying a very common misconception: that if enjoyable
Exploration is identifiable during play, then play must be Simulationist
or at least partly so. This is profoundly mistaken: if you address
Premise, it's Narrativist play. Period. If the Exploration involved, no
matter how intensive, hones and focuses that addressing-Premise process,
then that Exploration is still Narrativist, not Simulationist.

That's why Feng Shui and Hong Kong Action Theater are hard-core,
no-ambiguity Simulationist-facilitating games including their explicit
homage to specific cinematic stories, and that's why The Dying Earth
facilitates Narrativist play, because its Situations are loaded with the
requirement for satirical, judgmental input on the part of the players.

"El Dorado" was coined by Paul Czege to indicate the impossibility of a
1:1 Simulationist:Narrativist blend, although the term was appropriated by
others for the blend itself, as a desirable goal. I think some people who
claim to desire such a goal in play are simply looking for Narrativism
with a very strong Explorative chassis, and that the goal is not elusive
at all. Such "Vanilla Narrativism" is very easy and straightforward. The
key to finding it is to stop reinforcing Simulationist approaches to play.
Many role-players, identified by Jesse Burneko as
"Simulationist-by-habit," exhaust themselves by seeking El Dorado, racing
ever faster and farther, when all they have to do is stop running, turn
around, and find Vanilla Narrativism right in their grasp.

However, what about subordinate hybrids? Simulationist play works as an
underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play
can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented
moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play,
even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise
and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on
an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military
hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract
(e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as
Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up
pleasing neither enough to attract them further.

Historically, this approach has been poorly implemented in role-playing
texts, which swing into Simulationist phrasing extremely easily, for the
reasons I describe in "Simulationism: the Right to Dream". You cannot get
emergent Narrativist play specifically through putting more and more
effort into perfecting the Simulationism (which requires that the
Narrativism cease), no matter how "genre-faithful" or "character-faithful"
it may be. I consider most efforts in this direction to become reasonably
successful High-Concept Simulationism with a strong slant toward
Situation, mainly useful for enjoyable pastiche but not particularly for
Narrativist play at all.

The key issue is System. Narrativist play is best understood as a powerful
integration and feedback between character creation and the reward system,
however they may work, in that the former is merely the first step of the
latter in terms of addressing Premise. Whereas the usual effect in
High-Concept Simulationist play is to "fix" player-characters
appropriately into the Situation for purposes of affirming the
story-as-conceived, especially in terms of varying effectiveness at
specific task-categories, and reward systems in these games are usually
diminished and delayed to the point of absence. Games which stumbled over
this issue include Fading Suns and Legend of the Five Rings, both of which
require extensive Drifting to achieve even halting Narrativist play
despite considerable thematic content.

The more successful primarily-Narrativist, secondarily-Simulationist
hybrid designs include Obsidian, to some extent, possibly Continuum if I'm
reading it right, and The Riddle of Steel as the current shining light; I
also call attention to Robots & Rapiers, currently in development.

How about the reverse? Can Narrativist play underlie and reinforce a
primarily Simulationist approach? I consider this to be a very interesting
question, because it's not like Gamism in this regard at all. What happens
when Premise is addressed sporadically, or develops so slowly that the
majority of play is like those hardware-pages? Whether this is "slow
Narrativism" or "S-N-S" or just plain dysfunctional play is a matter of
specific instances, I think. But I do want to stress that it's not the
"N/S blend" as commonly construed, which is to say, both priorities firing
as equal pals.

Dysfunctional Narrativist play

GNS incompatibility

It is very easy to spot players who are disinclined toward Narrativist
play, but nevertheless want a story to be produced, in a group that favors
Narrativist-oriented play. They write up rich and intense characters on
paper, but in play, they're paralyzed. They can posture towards one
another, and they can defend against attack, and they can spot clues, beat
up mooks, and band together against a common threat like nobody's
business, but only on the basis of GM cues. In an otherwise Narrativist
group, they are black hole voids for addressing Premise, and typically
they don't continue playing with that group for long.

More subtle and more likely to be sustained are Narrativist-oriented
participants in largely non-Narrativist games. They practice "stealth"
play to get what they want, usually through making suggestions to the
authority in the group, often practicing a lot of trade-off negotiation. A
skilled stealther can sometimes become a significant co-GM as long as he
or she doesn't call attention to the influence. Stealthers tend to do a
lot of waiting.

Less happily, such a player in a game with a strong
Simulationist/Situation bent is in big trouble and vice versa, especially
when the group is committed to Illusionist Techniques. Illusionism is a
widespread technique of play and arguably, textually, the most supported
approach to the hobby, as testified most recently by the publication
Secrets of Game-mastering (2002, Atlas Games). It relies on Force, as
defined earlier in the essay. GMing with lots of covert Force is called
Illusionism. I call that the Black Curtain; if the Curtain is drawn, then
the players aren't immediately clued in about the presence and extent of
the Force itself.

Force (Illusionist or not) isn't necessarily dyfunctional: it works well
when the GM's main role is to make sure that the transcript ends up being
a story, with little pressure or expectation for the players to do so
beyond accepting the GM's Techniques. I think that a shared "agreement to
be deceived" is typically involved, i.e., the players agree not to look
behind the Black Curtain. I suggest that people who like Illusionist play
are very good at establishing and abiding by their tolerable degree of
Force, and Secrets of Gamemastering seems to bear that out as the
perceived main issue of satisfactory role-playing per se.

Producing a story via Force Techniques means that play must shift fully to
Simulationist play. "Story" becomes Explored Situation, the character
"works" insofar as he or she fits in, and the player's enjoyment arises
from contributing to that fitting-in. However, for the Narrativist player,
the issue is not the Curtain at all, but the Force. Force-based Techniques
are pure poison for Narrativist play and vice versa. The GM (or a person
currently in that role) can provide substantial input, notably adversity
and Weaving, but not specific protagonist decisions and actions; that is
the very essence of deprotagonizing Narrativist play.

Get just one Story Now player into an Illusionist group, and the game
becomes a battlefield for control and story creation. I consider this to
be one of the worst instances of high-level GNS incompatibility, because
it typically doesn't resolve itself through a clean parting of the ways.
As long as the people involved buy into the false notion that Narrativist
play is a subset of the Simulationist aesthetic, then the war will not
end, as they wave their "integrity of the story" flags at one another in
the mistaken belief that they share aesthetic goals.

It all becomes much clearer when the Gamism-Narrativism similarity is
acknowledged. No one in their right mind permits a fully-committed Gamist
into a Simulationist-Situation role-playing group, and the same goes for
fully-committed Narrativist participants, for the same reasons.

Ouija-board role-playing

Here's another outcome for the faulty Simulationist-makes-Narrativism
approach. Actually, it's the same phenomenon as
Simulationism-makes-Gamism, which I discussed in "Gamism: Step On Up"
([23]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/) as "the bitterest role-player
in the world." I consider the Narrativist version to be the "most deluded
role-player in the world."

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and
numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on
the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette
around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment,
someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the
planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own
power.

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist
play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's
part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one
guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion
that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable
confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism
perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on
maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. Typically,
groups who play this way have been together for a very long time.

My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way?
Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to
un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting,
cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not
include that option, at least not very easily. Participants in Ouija-board
play do so through selective remembering. I have observed many such
role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play
as "awesome!" given a week or two for mental editing.

What I see from such groups is the following:

* They use a highly customized house-version of a given rules-set,
usually AD&D, BRP, or an early edition of Champions; many of the
customized details are unrecorded.

* They employ a personalized set of subtle cues and expectations that
arise out of their long-term friendships and habits of play.

* The satisfaction-moments are rare to the extent of being perhaps a
yearly event. "Nothing happened tonight" is typical, but the group
believes that you don't legitimately get the cherished moments any
other way. Such moments are treasured and carefully repeated among
them.

* Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly
moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person
is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"

* They're socially isolated from other role-players, as their play is so
arcane and impenetrable that no one else can easily participate. If
they go to cons, they go together, stay together, and leave together.
One of them buys a new game that "looks good," and they rarely if ever
try it, always rejecting it when they do.

* They're socially isolated not only from gamers, but from everyone,
insofar as their hobby is concerned. Forget social context; it's just
these guys, aging, playing their tweaked versions of the game they
discovered in high school, reminiscing about that one awesome time
when character X did that awesome thing.

Ouija-board groups vary in terms of how much fun they have, and I'll leave
further discussion of the phenomenon to the forums.

Minor issues within Narrativist play

The first minor issue is not really a big deal - simply, not everyone is
necessarily a whiz at addressing Premise even when they try. If they were,
we'd see a hell of a lot more great novels, comics, movies, and plays than
we do. Signs of "hack Narrativism" include backing off from unexpected
opportunities to address Premise or consistently swinging play into parody
versions of the issues involved. I don't see any particular reason to
bemoan or criticize this bit of dysfunction; all art forms have their
Sunday practitioners.

The second is a recent phenomenon: the "do it right" purists, often
recently made aware of GNS or other theories, who then get on their fellow
participants' cases during play to accord with some theoretical ideal.
It's usually accompanied by the fallacy of focusing on one or more
Techniques as the "real" Narrativism.

The third was mentioned earlier, based on the tendency for pre-game
preparation to develop Situation so far along the process of addressing
Premise, that the participants' input during play essentially delivers
only the final moments. I call such play "96%-ing," which can be
functional, but it tends to play safe to a degree that undercuts the
process.

The fourth is maintaining privacy among the participants about what's
important to each one, whether about one's own character or the characters
of others. Such play might be thought of as keeping Premise personal and
close to the vest. That privacy may detract from others' enjoyment,
although see Ouija-board role-playing below for some further thoughts.

The final minor problem is to resolve play-Situations rapidly and without
developing them much beyond the initial preparatory circumstances: "over
before it begins." This typically occurs when people are so floored by the
possibility of actually addressing a Premise through play, that they hare
off to do so before some RPG god notices and intervenes to stop them.
Usually, this sort of play is a short-lived phase as the group builds
trust with one another.

Bad apple Narrativists

All of this section concerns Narrativist play which is practically
guaranteed to be dysfunctional. It's really one thing, but it comes in two
versions depending on whether the person in question is acting as GM.

The non-GM version is the Prima Donna, a devoted Premise-addresser - but
what he can't do is share. If a given scene is not about the issue that he
cares about, he disrupts things until it is. If his character is present
in a scene, then he'll demand center stage until forcibly stopped. He
understands protagonism, but won't permit anyone else to have it.
Essentially, he's the equivalent of the Hard Core Gamist, but with a
significant difference: only one person can do it successfully; it can't
even spread through the group. Prima Donnas are obnoxious, selfish, and
pushy. Their typical fate is to be removed from a group or to become its
GM (often to the present GM's consternation), in which latter case to
become a Typhoid Mary.

What's a Typhoid Mary? Well may you ask. It's a would-be Narrativist GM
who uses tons of Force upon the player-characters. He introduces the
Premise and is emotionally invested in how the players are supposed to
address it, to the extent that he makes their characters' significant
decisions for them. Effectively, this means the other people are present
only to praise and reflect the GM's ego. Play amounts to "we tell the
story, but I'm writing it" - he continually demands that the players
appreciate his Narrativist aesthetic, but suppresses the same aesthetic in
their behavior. He prioritizes and insists upon Premise-addressing input
yet makes it subject to his approval.

Such play is appallingly unrewarding and is rightly labeled railroading.
To sustain it, the Typhoid Mary must exert primary dominance over all
aspects of the Social Contract, which is usually not possible among
adults. I can think of no more effective means of ensuring that other
people never role-play again, than encountering a Typhoid Mary. Also,
unsurprisingly, get one Narrativist player with a spine in that game, and
it's root hog or die, the worst Force-vs.-Narrativist duel possible - such
conflicts have been known to disrupt romances, friendships, and even jobs
and marriages.

Narrativist game design

One reason I presented the big model of role-playing in this essay is to
say, game texts are no more nor less than recommendations, manuals, and
inspirational materials for play. For such texts to be effective, they
need to be clear and inspiring for all the levels in the model. I think
that Social Contract always comes first. Most especially for Narrativist
play, which has been textually marginalized throughout the hobby's
history, the game-rules' focus must expand to social and procedural
behavior at the table, not merely the Techniques subsets of scene and
conflict resolution.

What to do

I wrote a pretty sketchy little game in the early 1990s called "BSL," or
Bullshit-Less. You know what my friends said? "You can't read this like
you read a game book. To enjoy it, you'd have to play!" Much to my
surprise, that was a stone-wall stopping point for them. I had a terrible
time coming up with what they'd need to know in order to make that step
easily and quickly. I think that whatever a role-player is best at is the
last thing on earth that occurs to him or her to write about, and
Narrativist-oriented authors are especially in a jam, as they lack
precedents and examples.

Looking over the diversity I listed earlier, I realize that an effective
manual or teaching text was Terra Incognita for Narrativist play until
very recently. Sorcerer, for example, was not written as a teaching text
for a general role-playing audience, although its supplements were. Now,
however, we have InSpectres, Dust Devils, My Life with Master, the three
Sorcerer supplements, Universalis, Trollbabe, Legends of Alyria,
HeroQuest, and more, all representing individual attempts. (I will leave
the very interesting question of why Everway failed in this regard to
future discussions.)

So, the goal is to work through the big model, probably from the top down.
For a Narrativist-oriented game, the touchpoint throughout should always
be, what's the Premise? I think stating it right out in front of everybody
is the best way to go, or a version which is easily customized further. An
alternative might be to inspire the Premise through
Exploration-discussion, but it's risky - doing that usually works only for
Situation-based Premise games, like The Dying Earth.

Let's look at that diversity again. Where does Premise come from? How much
do you have to work with, and how much improvisation is involved during
play itself? Is the story underway yet, and how close are the
decision/crisis points? Where's the spin in the System? Dice? Others'
input? Any negotiation/trading? IIEE must be dead bang center with what
you're driving at; does the reward system feed back into protagonism?
Prompt Endgame? Shift GMing roles? Or what? What does actual play look
like, in terms of Ephemera-combinations clustering to create and/or
support Techniques?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Basic Source of GM Jobs: Story Resolution Behavior Thematic Content*:
Content: Premise Distribution Structure: and Reward: Mechanics: Risk factor;
Improv among Endings, See spectrum See depth; humor
vs. rock participants e.g. in essay spectrum
steady in essay
Sorcerer Steady Character Spread in Encouraged Connected: Middle High risk High
prep, by reward Short term depth Occasional
centralized system bonuses humor
in play Destiny and
goals in
Sorc & Sword
TROS Steady Character Centralized Varies by Connected: Middle Potential/variable
prep Spiritual risk Mild to
Attributes medium depth
Low/absent humor
Universalis Improv Varies Fully spread Varies by Fully Mild to Varies by group in
out prep identical none all three
(coins)
MLWM In Setting Mostly Fixed Connected: Extreme High risk Fixed
between centralized endgame Net medium depth Humor
consequences as defense
= Epilogue
HeroQuest Steady Setting Centralized None Fully Mild to Medium risk
identical middle Extreme depth Mild
but inescapable
humor
The Steady Situation Centralized Fixed Almost no Mild to High risk
Whispering conflict connection none Medium-low depth
Vault Low/absent humor
The Pool In Varies Mostly Varies by Fully Mild to Low risk, usually
between centralized prep identical none Mild if any depth
(dice) Humor varies by
group
InSpectres Improv Situation Partly Fixed Extremely Middle to High risk
centralized, conflict connected: strong Medium/fixed depth
with Stress and High humor
specific resources
non-GM input
moments
Castle Steady Setting Centralized None Almost no Mild to Low risk
Falkenstein connection none Low/variable depth
Occasional humor
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* Yes, this column is highly personal. Please feel free to fill it in
with your own assessments based on your play-experiences.

Some food for thought: constraints

A whole critique of the role of constraint in creativity is probably
beyond my powers, but I can't over-emphasize how important it's been in my
experiences of design, preparation, and satisfaction in any creative
endeavor. For role-playing, I think a designer should consider constraints
to be his or her most important ally: elements which, once established,
remain fixed and actively inform a whole suite of possibilities for the
future. Whether they concern Currency (e.g. Universalis), outcomes of
resolution (e.g. Sorcerer, The Riddle of Steel), character creation
options, behavioral choices, Setting, or whatever, strikes me as the
primary issue for designing games of any kind, and Narrativist goals need
them desperately.

I foresee a whole slew of threads discussing the difference between
"restraint" and "constraint," so here I'll only bring up how effective
Paul Czege's decision to constrain Setting is for My Life with Master.
Once you know "about 1805, central Europe, isolated village," the doors
are thrown open to bring maximum creativity to bear on the key issues of
the game. For whatever reason, I think that this aspect of the game text
makes the rest, especially the tricky wide-open parts like "More Than
Human," much easier. By comparison, the designs of Dust Devils and
Sorcerer are currently a bit hampered by their wide-open settings, which I
now think require a little too much group-based customizing. Or, at the
opposite extreme, Trollbabe does provide the Setting constraint, but it's
so subculturally focused (you get it or you don't) as to limit access to
the game. My Life with Master provides not only the focus, but also a
topic which raises the same issues for practically anyone who encounters
it. Furthermore, as Paul says, if someone wants to change the setting,
they'll do it - but they're able to do so all the better because the
textual setting made sense to them.

Pitfalls of Narrativist game design

1. The Timid Virgin. The reasonably successful Narrativist-leaning GM is
writing a game, and suddenly experiences a loss of nerve - he visualizes
all those other players out there who obviously don't play in this
fashion. One result is a kind of "but-but" motorboat effect scattered
through the generally Simulationist-reading text: admonishments to keep
non-GM participants from screwing up the apparently-Narrativist goals,
usually by pleading, scolding, or imposing sudden and apparently
out-of-place limits on the players' authority to provide input. Good
examples include Little Fears, The Burning Wheel, Fvlminata, and The Dying
Earth.

Another sort of Timid Virgin effect is a full spin toward Force Techniques
in isolated spots, which is less schizoid in terms of the reading
experience, but perhaps more confusing in the long run. Sorcerer, Everway,
Zero, Prince Valiant, and The Whispering Vault all have this bi-polar
problem, which I think characterizes many early-to-mid-90s game texts.

2. Karaoke. This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell
thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's
say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a
few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a
hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters.
Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme
in the text, in detail.

From Over the Edge (Atlas Games, 1994; author is Jonathan Tweet):

How to Use the Setting

When I first played OTE, it was on about ten minutes' notice. I had some
notes on major background conspiracies, a few images of various scenes,
and a primitive version of the current mechanics. No map, no descriptions
of businesses, people, places, or any of the other useful tidbits that are
crammed into the previous two chapters. [He ain't kidding, and actually
it's the previous four chapters, 152 pages total, in the second edition -
RE] Naturally I winged it.

That night were born Total Taxi, Giovanni's Cab's [sic], Cesar's Hotel,
and Sad Mary's, all now landmarks in the Edge. Things just happened. I
faked it. Since there's nothing that couldn't happen, anything I dreamt up
was OK.

Now, however, you have a background explaining who, what, where, and when.
You're in a completely different situation from where I was back on that
first manic evening.

[The rest of the section concerns converting the reader-GM's in-play
mistakes about the canonical setting into opportunities, as well as
altering it to taste; the suggestion that he may instead put himself
directly into Tweet's improvisational shoes at the outset is, to my eyes,
vividly absent - RE]

[several pages later] Could vs. Should

... The first time I played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the
background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not
having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination
loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background
prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard
for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to
what I've dreamed up, it's a curse.

All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing"
and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152
extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that
improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play.
I am saying, however, that 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?

3. Metaplot. From Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron
Edwards):

Metaplot. The solution most offered by role-playing games is a
supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which
are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and
expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions.
These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as
well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved
in these conflicts.

Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is
antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably,
it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for
play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the
authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group
in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than
creative musicians.

Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially
Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D'2, beginning with
the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are
perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they 'define
role-playing with strong Setting.

However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history
necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best
example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history
in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical
world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane
new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the
process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this
metaplot?

Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters;
they only provide context for them. The players know all about the
upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say)
a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended
to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only
through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a
crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide
theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest,
there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys
and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme
through their characters' decisions during those events.

In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest
following the full-disclosure lead of HeroQuest and abandoning the
metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.

4. Sole reliance on deepening and detailing any aspects of Exploration is
misguided. The vast majority of attempted Narrativist design is a hunt for
the perfect Simulationist design that will ostensibly permit the
Narrativist play to emerge, leading to abashedness at best. It's often
combined with mistaking an effectiveness-improvement mechanic for a reward
system - at this point, the game text simply facilitates High-Concept
Simulationist play, and the Narrativist goal is left to Social Contract
alone. Various publishing practices, especially a long string of scenario
and setting supplememnts, provide the coffin nails.

5. Going "no system," especially for IIEE aspects of play, combines the
undermining aspects of both of the above two approaches, especially when
the author idealizes story as a product rather than Narrativist play as a
process. Don't forget, all role-playing has a system; turning it over to
"oh, just decide and have fun" merely makes the system crappy and prone to
bullying.

Frankly, un-structured Drama turns out to be ill-suited to Narrativist
play. It's clear why people turn to it so consistently; years of suffering
through task-resolution systems that fail to resolve conflict, with the
attendant Simulationist creep of rules-revisions during the 1980s, is
enough to put any aspirant Narrativist off of "rules" and "systems."

The Window (latest version 1997, author is Scott Lininger) makes a brave
attempt at this approach to play:

You see, after trying what seems like a million different systems during
our own series of roleplaying games (perhaps you've seen this, too), we
slowly realized that no matter what rules we were using, the interaction
between the characters essentially ran the same. No matter what rules we
were using, the combat always moved along with the same ultimate effects:
it was just a question of how long it took to get there. Even the
character creation worked in the same way, or at least was visualized in
the same way.

As it was, our style had become more important to us than the system. We
spent many times the creative energy developing the world and our
characters than we did figuring up percentages, regardless of the genre we
chose. It wasn't the individual stats and skills that made us love our
characters, rather it was their actions and their personalities and how
they fit into the overall story.

The only time we really noticed which rules were being used was when they
somehow got in the way, as they inevitably did! That was the seed. We
decided that it was time for a system that would stay in the background...
be invisible as a pane of glass...

There are plenty of explicit Narrativist goals stated in The Window,
especially its Third Precept:

This is a big idea, though a simple one. It starts with the realization
that the actors and the Storyteller are all cooperating toward the same
goal: If everyone takes equal responsibility for the quality of the story
then all will benefit when it really starts working.

There are times when a good actor will let go of their own ego and let the
story take precedence over their character. There are times when a good
Storyteller will allow the actors to narrate scenes. The days of rival
camps delineated by a GM screen are over. Though obviously the
Storyteller's vision is what creates the seeds of roleplaying, nothing
much will grow without the actors' input. An open, out of character dialog
about the direction of the story should be maintained so that the
Storyteller knows what's working and what's not.

Strive for originality in all things. Your characters, their actions, and
their contribution to the narrative are totally up to you to decide, and
the essence of roleplaying is a creative one. Don't allow yourself to fall
back on stereotypes, and remember that what you create when you sit down
to roleplay is totally unique to you and your group of friends. The story
you mutually envision should be your own.

The Window includes a dice-rolling mechanic, but most of its resolution is
handled through Drama, with or without the rolls. Unfortunately, the
unstructured-Drama system of the game is anything but invisible - it must
be redefined and "referenced" at every moment of play. Contrary to popular
belief, it demonstrates the highest Points of Contact of any sort of
role-playing. Furthermore, it's the one mode of attempted Narrativist play
which fails to prioritize or organize protagonism. It mistakenly asssumes
that narration yields Narrativism, and that constraints on narration are
necessarily restraints on Narrativist play.

What's the problem with this? Why am I being so harshly critical? It all
goes back to Force - if establishing the IIEE circumstances is under one
person's control, without reference to any System features, then scenes'
outcomes become the province of that person. Which in turn means that the
decisions and actions of player-characters are now details of this one
person's decisions. Narrativist de-protagonism is the near-inevitable
result.

6. Fleeing to Social Contract to solve everything. Some designers,
enthralled by the idea that input does not have to be restricted to or
filtered through a central person, rely on the hope that everyone feels
like contributing extra-protagonist content at any given moment.
Unfortunately, this creates a "dead ball" effect in which one must create,
on the spot, both adversity and its resolution from whole cloth. People
apparently prefer a fair amount of context and constraint in order to
provide input instead.

A related tendency is to rely on restraint, stating or implying that "good
players wouldn't do that!" I suggest two alternative approaches: (1) that
System provide "rebound" or consequences to make the variety of choices
interesting, and (2) stating explict Creative Agenda expectations up
front.

The biggest pitfall of all, though, needs a section of its own.

The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast

All right, here we go. This section represents a different angle of attack
for me - I'm not discussing System or mechanics design at all, just the
"how to role-play" texts. Some of the following games have, in my view,
very focused Creative Agenda content in contrast to these sections; other
games, not listed or discussed, are comparatively muddled in procedural
terms but have crystal-clear "how-to" sections. So this is entirely about
the "how-to" text, nothing else.

From Space: 1889 (1988, GDW Inc, author is Frank Chadwick):

Each adventure is a story, and the player characters are its heroes, but
with an important distinction: Their actions are not determined by an
author, but rather by the players themselves.

[From the chapter "The Referee"]

... it is a good idea to conduct as many of the event resolution die rolls
as possible yourself and then announce the results. This makes the game
seem less mechanical to the players and enables you [to] add a secret die
roll modifier here or there to make things come out right without anyone
being the wiser. [Elsewhere in the text it is specified that this section
applies to critical events for the story - RE]

From Traveller (1996, Imperium Games Inc., authors are Marc Miller, Lester
Smith, Tony Lee)

The Players

Like a novel author or an actor in a drama, each player in a role-playing
game creates a persona, or character, to portray in the game ... the
player responds to the situation of the adventure as it unfolds, deciding
what the character would say or do in that situation. They don't just
watch the character, they choose the character's options.

The Referee

Management of the game is performed by a special player known as the
referee. ... Like the director of a movie, the referee judges what can and
cannot be accomplished in a particular scene.

From Tsyk (1996, Propaganda Publishing, author is Serge Stelmack):

Number Two: The personas are the property of the players.

Tsyk is not about players versus the GM. It is about the cooperative
weaving of a tale that everybody can enjoy. It does not make sense to use
the powers of gamemastery to try and dominate the personas, or to be
spiteful over their successes in the game.

Though it is the job of the GM to guide the characters through the
adventure, it is always the decisions of the players that dictate the
actions of the personas.

From Agone (2001, Multisim Publishing, authors include Sebatian Celerin,
Mathieu Gaborin, Stephane Marsan, Frederic Weil, and others):

ADVICE TO THE EG

The role of the Eminence Grise is crucial. He is the balance-keeper of the
game. He must prepare - and often create from scratch - thrilling plots
and describe the settings and their inhabitants ... In short, he enables
the players to live a good heroic-fantasy adventure. He must create a tale
in which the players' characters have the lead roles, in which they can,
through their actions, bring the story to one end or another.

In our world, the EG would be called a director or storyteller. Indeed, he
is simultaneously writer, director, and actor in a play or movie, which
improvises itself as hours of gameplay fly by.

From Undiscovered (2001, Eilfin Publishing, authors include Adam D.
Theriault, Antonio da Rosa, Philip Theriault):

Guiding Your Adventures

Let the players control their own fate. Although it is your story, you
must follow the whims of the characters. It is, after all, their lives
they are playing out. The characters must have the freedom to choose their
own fates, not just do what the AG tells them to do. It is your job,
however, to guide the characters through the story you have created.

What could any of this be saying? How is Entity A creating the tale,
guiding characters through the adventure, judging what can be accomplished
in a scene, making things come out right, and "your story" to be
reconciled with Entity B being "like a novel author," determining
characters' actions, bringing a story to an end, and having the lead
roles? As plain explanation, all such text is unmitigated nonsense. It's
such nonsense, that personalized readings that themselves make sense are
often projected onto it, as what the authors "must obviously" have meant.
Two such projections include:

1. Players of the protagonists always provide those characters'
decisions, especially climactic ones that drive the resolving scenes;
the GM-role is there to provide relevant adversity for everyone else,
e.g. managing scene framing, Bangs, and pacing.

2. The GM has the story decisions, i.e., wields substantial Force.
"Story" isn't coming from player decisions at all and may be
considered, itself, a piece of Explorative-material input from the GM.
Everyone else is providing color and material through
pseudo-decisions.

Both of these are perfectly reasonable approaches to play. Don't mistake
your solution as justification for Impossible Thing game text. If a person
is stuck in the rhetoric of The Impossible Thing, he tends to seize his
personal solution and embrace it like a life-raft, rejecting any
examination of the Thing itself.

No one is safe, apparently. From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1994, author is
Christian Aldridge):

What happens in a game

Characters will have goals they want to attain, and obstacles to overcome.
The story that the narrator creates will provide the setting and the plot.
In that plot the characters might stumble into adventure accidentally, or
become embroiled in international espionage, or choose to seek out fame
and fortune as tomb-robbers or pirates. The important point is that the
players author the tale through the actions of their characters.

Gaaaahh! Right there in a book studded with some of the finest applied
Narrativist techniques known to role-playing, there it squats, pulsing!
Based on the rest of the text as well as my discussions with Aldridge, I
know the first "provide the story" in this excerpt indicates adversity;
the second ("author the tale") indicates Narrativist protagonism. But
without that distinction in mind, reading such explanations is agonizing;
one can see the author filling in phrases he is accustomed to seeing in
role-playing texts, then, clearly realizing he's written something he
didn't mean, correcting himself mid-paragraph, resulting in a
contradictory hash.

As discussed earlier, the issue hinges on the super-big red herring called
"the plot, the story." It can mean so many things: - the NPCs' plan to do
something, which is irrelevant in GNS terms, as that's merely in-game
adversity, a staple of any role-playing. - given the definite article and
given a pre-player-decision context, it's absolutely anathema to
Narrativist play. - stripped of that article and given a purely post-play
context, it means nothing more than story, and is irrelevant for prep for
Narrativist play.

It's also easy to get distracted by the word "GM." A person may have a
mental tautology going between "GM" and "power," with a corresponding
death-grip on his or her perceived responsibility to perform and
entertain. Once the term is understood to be a set of independent roles
which may be distributed differently across the participants, then the
whole thing becomes a lot easier.

As far as game design and text is concerned, The Impossible Thing is easy
to avoid. All you have to do is be up-front about where and how those
GM-roles are distributed. If you're doing a solid Simulationist game with
a strong story emphasis via Force, say so and don't bleat about "players
control their characters' decisions" (see Call of Cthulhu and
Arrowflight). If you're doing a solid Narrativist game, keep Force out of
it entirely (see Dust Devils, InSpectres, and My Life with Master).

The hard question

I suggest that both Gamist and Narrativist priorities are clear and
automatic, with easy-to-see parallels in other activities and apparently
founded upon a lot of hardwiring in the human mind (or "psyche" or
"spirit" or whatever you want to call it). Whereas I think Simulationist
priorities must be trained - it is highly derived play, based mainly on
canonical fandom and focus on pastiche, and requires a great deal of
contextualized knowledge and stern social reinforcement. This training is
characterized by teaching people not to do what they're inclined to. No
one needs to learn how to role-play, but most do need to learn to play
Simulationist, by stifling their Gamist and/or Narrativist proclivities.
Such training is often quite harsh and may involve rewards and punishments
such as whether the person is "worthy" to be friends with the group
members.

If the typical role-playing preferences among humans are Gamist and
Narrativist, then play based on these modes should be easy to pick up,
easy to spread, and easy to sell, and I think it is all three. However,
since the typical role-playing text and typical training is Simulationist,
the net effect is to bump the majority of interested people away from the
hobby after first contact, and to consolidate the Simulationist primacy in
all evident features of the hobby, as opposed to the potential ones. This
is one of several reasons why the hobby remains decidedly fringe.

So the first question is, how about you? Are you Simulationist-by-habit,
which is to say, well-trained to this mode by the first group you
encountered? If so, is that what you really want? If so, then excellent.
But! If not, if you'd rather be addressing Premise, then you have a lot of
habits to break - perhaps even those which, in your mind, originally
defined the activity.

The second, larger question is much like the Gamist one: why role-play for
this purpose? Why this venue, and not some more widely-recognized medium
like writing comics or novels or screenplays? Addressing Premise can be
done in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artistic media. To play Narrativist,
you must be seizing role-playing, seeing some essential feature in the
medium itself, which demands that Premise be addressed in this way for you
and not another. What is that feature? If you can't see one, then maybe,
just maybe, you are slumming in this hobby because you're afraid you can't
hack it in a commercial artistic environment. Maybe you even hang with a
primarily-Simulationist group, with the minimal levels of satisfaction to
be gained among them, because it's safe there.

But let's say you do answer that question, and hold your head up as a
Narrativist role-playing practitioner, addresser of Premise. Fine - now
you have to ask yourself whether you can handle artistic rejection. That's
right, no one might be interested in you. This is exactly what all
aspiring directors, screenwriters, novelists, and other practitioners of
narrative artistry face. In which case, you'll have to decide whether it's
because your worthy vision is unappreciated and should seek new
collaborators, or because your vision is simply lacking. It's not an easy
thing to deal with.

But let's say that's all resolved too, and you are holding the brass ring:
successful and fulfilling Narrativist play with a great bunch of fellow
participants, fine and exciting content from your and the others' work,
and the sense of worthy artistry. Now for the final conundrum: what will
you sacrifice to sustain it? Maybe your spouse is tired of the time you
spend on this; maybe you and a fellow group member get a little too close;
maybe you decide your art would be even better if your best friend's sorry
ass was no longer gumming up the group's work. Can you make those sorts of
choices? Can you live with the results?

Good luck with it. No one ever claimed that balls-to-the-wall artists were
necessarily easy to live with.

Glossary

The following terms continue the lists at the end of the essays
"Simulationism: the Right to Dream"
([24]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/) and "Gamism: Step On Up"
([25]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/), which themselves are
additions to the definitions given in "GNS and other matters of
role-playing theory" ([26]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/). Which is
a polite way of saying go look at all of them, for now. A complete
glossary is under way.

Bangs

Introducing events into the game which make a
thematically-significant or at least evocative choice necessary
for a player. The term is taken from the rules of Sorcerer.

Black Curtain

My term for the techniques a GM may employ to keep his use of
Force hidden from the other participants in the game, such that
they are at least somewhat under the impression that their
characters' significant decisions are under their control. See
Illusionism.

Blood Opera

Play in which character generation focuses on potentially
irreconcilable differences among at least some of the characters,
and in which scenario generation is designed to put as much
pressure on these differences (and therefore on unexpected
alliances as possible). Notable for high mortality rates among
characters, in the manner of Reservoir Dogs. The term was coined
by Ralph Mazza, Jake Norwood, and myself after playing an
especially masochistic session of The Riddle of Steel during
Origins 2003.

Bob (from Sex & Sorcery)

Withholding response or otherwise mandating a "rest" in the
Premise-addressing action of play.

Conflict resolution

A technique in which the resolution mechanisms of play focus on
conflicts of interest, rather than on the component tasks within
that conflict. When using this technique, inanimate objects are
conceived to have "interests" at odds with the character, if
necessary. Contrast with Task resolution.

Congruence

Term coined by Walt Freitag to describe the theoretical
possibility of simultaneous play of different Creative Agendas
which, although fulfilling very different needs for their
employers, are also mutually supportive between those employers.
The existence of sustained congruence remains controversial.

Cross (from Sex & Sorcery)

Introducing effects from previous scenes into current scenes,
although the scenes do not contain the same protagonists.

Deprotagonize (Paul Czege)

To limit or devalue another person's opportunity to establish
their character as a protagonist during Narrativist play. Note
that this is specific to Paul's use of Protagonism strictly in the
limited Narrativist context.

Egri, Lajos

the author of The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946); see Premise.

El Dorado

Coined by Paul Czege, a term for the unrealizable ideal of
consistently addressing Premise through explicitly Simulationist
play.

Force

Originally called "GM-oomph" (Ron Edwards), then "GM-Force" (Mike
Holmes) - Control over the protagonist characters'
thematically-significant decisions by anyone who is not the
character's player. The Force is an especially good term for this
phenomenon, due to (1) its sense of imposed mandate and
strength-in-control (not just input), and (2) its parodic Star
Wars connotation - whatever you want the plot to be, "use the
Force!"

Ouija-board role-playing

Coined by me in this essay, a form of Illusionism practiced among
all the participants upon one another to conceal both Step On Up
and Story Now priorities from one another.

Pastiche

An artistic production which relies on invoking pre-existing
productions' features for its primary effect; at worst, a simple
imitation, but at best, potentially a strong secondary commentator
on the original text. Often associated with "fanfic" or other
forms of homage.

Premise (adapted from Egri)

A generalizable, problematic aspect of human interactions. Early
in the process of creating or experiencing a story, a Premise is
best understood as a proposition or perhaps an ideological
challenge to the world represented by the protagonist's passions.
Later in the process, resolving the conflicts of the story
transforms Premise into a theme - a judgmental statement about how
to act, behave, or believe.

Prima Donna

A Narrativist player who engages in Premise-addressing, but will
not share screen time or Premise-significant decision-making time
with other participants. An extremely dysfunctional subset of
Narrativist play.

Protagonism

A problematic term with two possible meanings. (A) A
characteristic of the main characters of stories, regardless of
who produced the stories in whatever way. (2) A characteristic set
of behaviors among people during role-playing, associated with
Narrativist play, with a necessary equivalent in Gamist play and
possible and Simulationist play.

Railroading

Control of a player-character's decisions by the GM, or
opportunities for decisions, in any way which breaks the Social
Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player.

Simulationist-by-habit (Jesse Burneko)

A form of synecdoche which defines "role-playing" according to
certain historically-widespread Simulationist approaches to play."
The system's job is to provide the physics of the game-world" is a
good example.

Story

an imaginary series of events which includes at least one
protagonist, at least one conflict, and events which may be
construed as a resolution of the conflict.

Story Now

a mode, or Creative Agenda, in which Premise is addressed through
play. The epiphenomenal outcome for the transcript is almost
always a story.

Task resolution

a technique in which the resolution mechanisms of play focus on
within-game cause, in linear in-game time, in terms of whether the
acting character is competent to perform a task. Contrast with
Conflict resolution.

Transcript

an account of the imaginary events of play without reference to
any role-playing procedures. A transcript may or may not be a
story.

Transition (coined by Fang Langford)

Changing from one Creative Agenda to another through the course of
play using rules designed to make that process easy.

Typhoid Mary

A GM who employs Force in the interests of "a better story,"
usually identifiable as addressing Premise; however, in doing so,
the GM automatically de-protagonizes Narrativist players and
therefore undercuts his or her own priorities of play, as well as
being perceived as a railroader by the players. An extremely
dysfunctional subset of Narrativist play.

Vanilla Narrativism: Narrativist play without notable use of the following
techniques

Director Stance, atypical distribution of GM tasks, verbalizing
the Premise in abstract terms, overt rules concerning narration,
and improvised additions to the setting or situations. People who
typically play in this fashion often fail to recognize themselves
as Narrativists.

Weave (from Sex & Sorcery)

A GM technique of bringing NPC activities closer to the
player-characters and to introduce multiple responses among NPC
and player-character actions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last updated 29-Jan-2004 09:56:35 CDT

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