My brother, Leigh Walton, is one smart cookie. He just sent me the following:

I guess it's pretty obvious why so many RPGs work with the theme "we are all members of a special group that is different from normal society, and thus we are thrust together in a love/hate familial community."

Considering the demographics of RPG players (nerds: oppressed minorities and elitists), the practical requirements of plot (generally need to keep the number of NPCs manageably small), and the nature of roleplaying (assembling to perform a ritual that the outside world doesn't understand; sealing ourselves off into a fantasy universe; often forming a genuine OOC bond with other players), it's practically inevitable. There is also a ton of potential story content associated with family relationships.

But are there alternatives?

At times I find the WoD-style elitism/insularity tiresome (among other things, it can contribute to unpleasantness in the players' OOC attitudes). I wonder how a game might encourage players to think of themselves/characters as members of a global and/or welcoming community.

To add another facet, I wrote back:

I totally agree with you about the tendency to project geek outsider culture into the setting and character choices of most games. But I think you see similar patterns enacted in lots of other mediums (X-Men, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Narnia, basically all fiction aimed at young adults), and those mediums (superheroes, sci-fi, fantasy, epic heroic history/myth) have always been the source material for most roleplaying. That doesn't mean it's a great idea, but I don't think roleplaying is alone in this.

So how do we adapt the roleplaying medium itself and the content of our stories (setting, character, etc.) to make it more open and less closed off and private?

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: I'm not saying insular or elite stories is will give you lung cancer. There are lots of good stories about small, close-knit groups or people who are someone different from everyone else, but there are other stories worth telling too. This is a push for variety, not a "your fun is bad!" power play.

P.S. How can I convince my brother to come post semi-regularly on Story Games?

Okay, I see how these are not elitist in the traditional sense, but they're still about an insular group of people. I mean Breaking the Ice focuses on a single couple, which is sorta more insular that play traditionally is. And the same with most of the rest.

I think part of it may be the strong correlation between the situation of the players (in their roleplaying group) and the situation of the characters (in their little micro-community). Vincent's been talking recently about disassociating the main characters from the players (having no PC of your own, basically), which might be one way to start getting at this. Also, imagine a game designed to support a radically different group of players at each session or one that requires at least one newcomer who's never played before or one that involves safe and non-freaky interplay with non-participants (one of Leigh's suggestions).

A. S. Up to you!

Is "a game designed to support a radically different group of players at each session" significantly different from a one-shot in some manner?

You know how Torchbearer handles player rotation and player-ingependent game continuity...

Shreyas, I'm imagining a series of "one-shots" in the same general setting, focusing on different characters, more like an anthology of tales. Take as your inspiration: the Canterbury Tales, the Anansi stories (which all feature Anansi, but a different backing cast), the Arabian Nights (which features a few reoccuring characters), all the James Bond movies (some of which feature a different guy playing Bond!), or a version of Dogs where you bring in new people each time to play the denizens of the town and the configuration of Dogs can change fairly easily.

Also, yes, Torchbearer is hot stuff. Is that what you wanna hear? :)

Dev, I'm interested in both. If you want to split your responses into...

Meta-Game Centered!
a)
b)
c)...

Fiction Centered!
x)
y)
z)...

...that's cool by me.

I know TB isn't even a whole step in the direction you're pointing.

This technique of setting diverse and non-continuous characters in a continuous world is old and strong, and it's interesting that we don't see it as much in roleplaying games. I think there are good reasons for that, relating to our technology; we have a lot of ways to say interesting things about particular characters, but I don't think our techniques for recognizing characters as instances of a stock-character template, or seeing the way one person relates to the world at large, are as good, and I feel like these techniques are what we would need to run games with less insular casts in the fiction.

I really got nothing for the meta angle.

I do have a thought about your source material--

Anansi, Arabian Nights, and JB all have a core character set; it is just very small. The storyteller doesn't even appear in all her stories, but she and the sultan have a palpable presence! This is an important difference between these and Canterbury Tales, I think.

Understand that I am *all* about the idea of one-shottable serializable play with differing groups of people. (My two Game Chef entries actually conform to this!) My guess is that the key to getting that to work is reducing the commitment and exclusivity a game requires. So a few quit targets where most RPGs require commitment/exclusivity:

* large initial effort in character creation / preparation / learning rules
* attention investment in a extensive and frequently esoteric setting that must be grokked for good play
* timing of several sessions of multiple hours
* need for deep player-to-character emotional investment in order to get into character and to properly portray her
* levels of mechanical proficiency (understanding how to best use raises / duels of wits / etc)
* need for isolation from others (Don't you need "freedom from distractions" for the game to play well? How many storygame sessions will go well if you have 4 participants and 3 people watching? We want to avoid a game where we have to tell the other people to just buzz off.)

More generally, I feel this tends towards a game where the play is at manipulating interesting characters and things in a fiction, but not necessarily personal immersion or playing of a role - you simply can't do those as well without more investment upfront, so is it better to reach for the goals you can do in those constraints? (And I'm seeing now that the choices you make here will necessarily affect what kind of fiction you go for emulating.)

Jonathan --

Can you think of an example of any story, anywhere, which is actually enjoyable to read (i.e. a functional story) and does not have, to some extent, a central cast?

yrs--
--Ben

Fred,

I'm inclined to be with you on one and two, but you can tell some awesome stories using number three. I mean, I can imagine a great game in which the "relation" between the main characters is that they each live in similar situations, but they never meet each other. That could be a lot of fun, and totally functional.

Thomas

Plus, and I mean this question honestly, what the hell is the point in getting onto a thread just to "reject" the points?

If it isn't interesting or useful to you, why post at all?

Jonathan, have you seen my game-in-progress Art, Grace & Guts?

Check it out.

[There we go, logged in as me not Meg.]

So maybe we can think about ways of rephrasing these points so that they work better with story-making.

For example, I agree that the main characters of a story must be special in some way - even if only in their supposed ordinariness. (Babbitt, anyone?) They're chosen to be the focus of the story for a reason! So maybe instead we can ask, "What are other ways that main characters of other media are special, which aren't being represented in role-playing right now?" Asking that question is what got me and my partner designing a game thematically based on Sex and the City, for example. These people are not weird social outcasts, they're the center of the world (as far as they're concerned). A Sinclair Lewis-inspired game (or a Carol Shields one!!) could explore the power of the apparently mundane.

In practice, the PCs must operate within a limited social circle - just because you have to have some way of maintaining a mental model of their social relationships, or else the story becomes incoherent. I think, though, that that limited circle doesn't have to be Everyone Who's Really Important (vampires, magi, other superheroes, Nobles). What if more role-playing games took a more realistic attitude to where the locus of power and control is in the world - outside your immediate social circle? What if role-playing games paid more attention to the power of weak ties rather than strong, intimate ones? (I strongly recommend the original Granovetter article if you want to get a sense of why weak ties are hugely important.)

As far as "no particular connection" goes, I think it's unrealistic and not so much fun to say, "these characters will never meet and have no relationship to each other" ... unless you develop that relationship in play, or you find ways to play in smaller sub-groups and make the larger story out of those smaller units of play, or you let people be NPCs in each other's stories. Or, you could reconceptualize the 'party' mentality of many role-playing games and work with other ideas of how people relate to each other. ("We just happen to live on the same block," for example, "but we each have intimate relations with people who aren't the other PCs.") Looking at existing stories can give us some ideas of how less tightly-tied groups of heroes can work - i.e. someone already mentioned Magnolia.

Yes, many of these things are core to making people able to tell stories, but I can already see a number of interesting design challenges in there. What would it take to get us to try them?

Also, what is "outsourcing play?"

--Jess

Jess,

The other thing that vast quantities of literature do with "normal people" is to do normal people in moments of transition and choice. Many RPGs are starting to do this, but we still have a tendancy to do "normal people in extrodinary moments of transition" (ie war) -- where it is possible to get your Michael Chabon on with normal people in painful, but pretty common to humanity, moments of transition. The husband deciding to stay with his frigid wife or screw his secretary, the woman dealing with the choice between finishing college and taking care of her depressive brother, etc. Shows like Six Feet Under are built off of this type of thing.

Also, your points about the type of limited social circle are solid. There is a difference between "we can only have so many characters in our game" and "we can only have these types of important characters in our games." No story has room for unlimited characters, even the Mahabharata tops out with a couple thousand. But, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a lot more variation in characters -- and not just in general, but within each game. Hell, form many Sim agendas doing so could only help.

The "no particular connection" angle is also an interesting one. How do we mean it? That the PCs will never meet at all? That they will never be connected at all? That they just won't be part of a family or clan, and will form bonds based on other criteria? Because parts of those have already been done in lots of games, and I don't know that any of them are impossible. (Though the "never connected at all in any way" is a tricky one.)

Many trady games make the PCs part of an inter-dependent and isolated clan (be it a Vampire clan, an Exalted type, a government agency under fire, and so on because the PCs need good reasons to work together and stay together in an unnatural party grouping because its often assumed the players won't be bringing that themselves. Getting the kind of party cooperation they require to work isn't easy, and without some deliberation in setup can be impossible. So making the PCs have an inherent and vested reason to work together is a huge thing. (Dogs, btw, plays with this by giving the PCs a strong reason to be and stay together while making a game situation that is likely to end up with PCs killing each other every so often.)

OTOH, a lot of Sorcerer groups that I've seen start out with PCs who aren't connected to each other at all intially, and who come to interact with each other only by being drawn into the same FUBARed relationship map. Their relationship comes by being related to other people, like the way that mutual friends and random aquaintances meet IRL. And yea, in some of these games the PCs may never meet each other or deal with each other face to face. It still works, so long as they're part of the same story and have to deal with issues caused by the choices of the others.

Of course, I've also been thinking about these a lot in the past few months, as I ready up the new playtest document for Thousand Stories.

Hmmm. I'd like to explore some of these ideas and what they might mean:

1. Normal PCs: I think it's pretty obvious here that the intended meaning is "not people with superpowers, extraordinary training". Ordinary joes. Maybe an occasional professional like a doctor or lawyer, but mostly working-class people.
2. Broader social circle: I think this refers more to which NPC extras can be brought into play as being more relevant, not to the number of characters in play at any given time. In most games, butchers, janitors, and retail clerks don't become part of the story unless they are murderers, secret mutants, sorcerers, or somehow extraordinary and thus part of the insular social circle.
3. No particular connection between PCs: although the Magnolia example implies some PCs have no connection at all, I think this is being offered as a special case of "no connection that everyone share". In other words, no "you are all students at School X" or "you all work for Company Y". I don't see this as a prohibition against relationships, as long as some PCs are not directly related.
4. Fighting the "club" instinct: This is distinct from the other three in that it's about the players rather than the fiction they create.

I'm not too terribly interested in #4, but I'd like to mention that Colorless Green Ideas (from the last Game Chef) had an interesting solution to this: only one player, the Dreamer, is required to be constant, while other players (the Loas) are quickly defined based on whatever prop that player happened to be carrying at the time. Also, if you wanted to rename the GM role as Director and other traditional role as Cast, it's easier to define a third role, Audience, and come up with rules to allow members of the public to participate in a game without actually creating characters. Someone once described a PTA game where they gave a newcomer Fan Mail capability, for example.

I think the Ronnies competition which offered "Suburban" as one of the motifs, resulted in several designs that meet criteria #1 and #2. Drama (or sitcoms) about people in a neighborhood without the extraordinary (supernatural, superpowers, murders to be investigated, and so on) can create stories about ordinary people who can become involved with each other or with NPCs of virtually any social class. I don't think it's that hard to add #3 to such a design, either.

Brand:

Good point. I can only think of a couple of games that really support "ordinary" moments of transition and choice, but now I want to go make some. :)

Also, how do we get our dirty hands on playtest copies of 1000 Stories?

talysman:

I like your definition of issue #2. I think the way you're talking about #1, though, opens up the whole can of "who do we find worth representing in stories" class-gender-race worms. (Bet you didn't know there were race worms! But there are!) Not that it's a bad thing to talk about, but there's a difference between having people be not-special and taking on issues of class/race/gender head-on.

Of course, you're talking to the girl who's (slowly) making a Zola-inspired game. Can you say drama of the dispossessed, baby? :)

--Jess

Jess said:

Also, how do we get our dirty hands on playtest copies of 1000 Stories?

I'll have to beat it out of Brand. We have a skeleton down, but he's working on the playtest drafts, and they've been lagging too long. A lot of this is my fault in recent weeks, because all my design headspace has transferred to C&P, and I've been infringing on Brand's design space too. Maybe if I back off and do C&P more quietly, he could actually get our drafts in working order.

It is so everything that Jon's looking for: real people, non insular PC groups, single stories (1000 stories, natch), open player groups (those who are available can play, don't need all hands of a broader circle on deck each time,new players introduced easily).

Brand,

This thread makes me really jazzed about 1000 Stories again, like I felt back in November. We gotta move, man!

From Leigh:

I have applied for a Story Games account (no guarantees on how much I'll use it), but apparently won't get a response for a while.

Quick replies:

A couple people took the list as some kind of manifesto, which it really wasn't. It's a list of ORs, not ANDs. Each one is meant to be an idea to explore-- it's not an all-or-nothing program.

I agree that "deconstructing in-game insularity" and "deconstructing meta-game insularity" are separate topics, though they are somewhat related.

Idea #3-- the Magnolia model, for those who haven't seen the movie, is like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-- every character connects to other characters, but in a long chain rather than a big cluster. Lots of stories are like this - not everyone knows everyone else - Magnolia just emphasizes it, and covers a much wider range of character types than most fiction.

BTW, I came across this and it seemed relevant.

Also, some of the connections between characters in Magnolia are not factual but thematic-- Tom Cruise hates his father for years of neglect, while Jeremy Blackman is completely under the thumb of his overbearing father. During one of the movie's climaxes we cut back and forth between Tom cursing his father beside his deathbed and another character admitting that he may have molested his own daughter. The characters involved don't know each other, but by juxtaposing scenes the movie communicates a lot thematically.

One idea would be to have each player play a particular "type" or theme, which would be incarnated in different ways in different scenes. Like if I'm playing "the asshole," then whatever is happening in the game, I'm an asshole, and when my current asshole character leaves the scene then a new one appears. The possibilities are endless. "The attention whore," "the skeptic," "the in-over-his-head person." I know other games have combined this idea with a supernatural element -- you are actually playing the Power of Assholes, and though you manifest in different ways you maintain a common personality/character. But then you still end up with a bunch of Powers sitting around masturbating with each other and having conflicts within The Community of Powers or whatever. This idea would be to remove that centralizing element.

One phrase that came to me whilst reading: Lots of RPGs try to be X-Men. What I'm suggesting would be more along the lines of Optic Nerve, or a Will Eisner comic. Decidedly un-special characters, going through little isolated bits of life drama.

Of course, plenty of people think Optic Nerve is crushingly dull...

Good point, CPXB. I'd say there's still a difference between the X-Men and the Justice League, despite them both being elites.

Oh, and also:

Leigh, we're doing something a bit like what you suggest in Gloria Mundi, though not as extreme. Everyone has two or three characters who come from different Roman-era cultures. When we're doing a session in Dacia, the cast will be different from the sessions we do in Gaul or in Rome - but we tie the sessions together by having the characters' actions affect each other from afar, and by pursuing the same thematic elements. Once we find a group of characters that works for a particular situation or setting, we do tend to hold on to them and play them pretty straightforwardly, but on a macro level we're trying to work with something a bit like what you describe. You're actually making me wonder how we can push this further without losing the narrative coherence we've been building.

By the way, I can shut up about "what we do in GM" anytime you like, folks. :)

--Jess

No, I'd have to talk to my group about that. It's a huge amount of data ... I'll see what they think.

--Jess

Jess,

I don't mind you talking about Gloria Mundi at all. I do, however, demand that you change the name of the game. I don't know if anyone mentioned it, but it is actually illegal in all 48 of the continental United States to name games or campaigns in such a way that they get abbreviated "GM".

I'm just letting you know... lest they knock on your door tomorrow.

Thomas

Jess,

Actually, your point is well taken. But I think that's a function of the horror genre -- IMO, horror stories require characters to be either helpless or hopeless, and if you make your characters a bunch of cyberninja with weapons that can level cities "helpless" doesn't precisely leap to mind, hehe. Reg'lar jane and joes work well with horror because it doesn't stretch verisimilitude to imagine them at a loss in horror situations. (And, indeed, one of the weaknesses of King's writing is that he often has the characters become elites by the end; the premises of horror are lost and the books often become fantasy adventures because of the characters' increasing abilities to battle, and defeat, whatever evil they face. And, for whatever it's worth, hehe, when I walk to my local game store I pass right by King's Bangor, Maine, house. Fun facts about Chris: he lives a block away from Stephen King.)

And, of course, other authors like Kootz or Ray Bradbury, can write (often compelling) stories about regular people. Nevertheless, outside of the horror genre I can't think of any popular genre of stories played by gamers where ordinary people would be seen as legitimate protagonists.

Which isn't to say that people shouldn't make those sorts of games. But I don't think it'll be, in any real sense, opening up gaming to non-gamers.

My intuition is that to open up gaming to non-gamers one would have to address the classism, racism and sexism that comes with gaming culture. That what limits people from getting into RPGs isn't that gamers are nerds, or that the games deal with elite people, but that gaming culture has some cultural artifacts that disincline people in the working class, women and minorities from more participation. *opens up the worm can*

-- Chris

Everyone on this thread has read some "men's adventure" genre novels, right?

To some degree, all of those, though Remo & Chiun is closest to what I was thinking of, and perhaps the best of the bunch. Mack Bolan (with all his increasingly ridiculous and amazingly bad spinoffs), the Penetrator, the Superhawks, the post-apocalyptic Ashes series, and so on. Series westerns like Wagons West!, Longarm, the Gunsmith, and Jake Logan. These stories are incredibly formulaic. Indeed, you can easily tell that the Jake Logan series is written by dozens of different writers all following the basic script and a setting bible. They're incredibly popular with middle- and lower-class men (typically white men) and they follow a good deal of the same sorts of elitist tropes as the oroginal poster was concerned with in his exchange with his friend.

It's not even a nerd-oriented social construction - it's simply conservative. We are the few who see things they way they really are in this dangerous world, fortunately, along with our superior knowledge we also have superior ability and we use it to defeat evil even if it crosses the line of the law or puts us in danger. If you're tracing back the social construction of gaming, don't just say "well, we were nerds who felt oppressed, so that's where it comes from", nuh uh, there's a whole multi-million dollar fiction industry, with roots in the paperback explosion and the earlier pulps with the same social construction that has nothing to do with nerd-dom.

They're incredibly popular with middle- and lower-class men (typically white men)

Are popular or were popular? I only even know about Remo the Destroyer from a friend whose dad loaned him the novels. I know it's still being produced, because I see a small selection of the stuff at truck stops, with volume numbers into the hundreds. I had relegated them to a past historical phenomenon which waned somewhere around 1980, when direct-to-video action movies came along. I, in fact, often fantasize of a halycon golden age when manly men sat around on the bus and park benches and steel girders READING all kinds of ass-kicking action.

Whatever, that's a tangent. I think you're right on regarding the elitist/conservative appeal.