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The Way It Is [Jul. 17th, 2008|10:01 pm]
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When something outside of yourself resembles your imagination very closely, it's a powerful experience. When something outside of yourself seduces your imagination, brings it into the fold, and then denies you control, even for the sake of limited negotiation, story control or personal relevance, it's even stronger.



You are blocked, You are hurt. Especially if it's worthwhile. You are not sharing an experience. You are alone. You are not a fucking "protagonist" awaiting contrivances. You can't have what you want in character. You can't have what you want out of character. Nobody says yes. You do not get to roll the fucking dice. It isn't safe, and when I say that I don't mean the vapid, pathetic usage of "unsafe" that is in fact very fucking safe. You do not know if you are angry, or if the character is angry.

You don't get to choose.

That's when you'll abandon the geek-guilt and stop trying to ape the idiotic 19th Century, High School English conception of story. That's when you will embrace the form for what it can do. That's when you will remember. Not invent. Remember.

I remember one of the most important things anyone's said to me about gaming. I was at the bar with a friend from university: a woman I never gamed with, but who played quite a bit with her friends. She remembered a long RIFTS campaign and talked about it in light casual tones, then stopped for a beat and said this:

I walked across the Quebec with five people -- my unit -- living in my armor. I have these powerful memories of things that never happened to me.

RIFTS, for God's sake.

So, Watchmen.

Alan Moore's objection to a film is essentially correct. It was built to play out in one medium. Just one, where it can unfold in the way it couldn't as anything else. And he took that which had been considered cultural trash to all but a few fans and showed us how it worked.

There is a way roleplaying games work. You can recoil from the threshold and make excuses, you can make a rational decision to stop at your own comfort level, or you can take that final step.

You can create powerful memories of things that never happened to you.

Memories are unkind. Even the sweetest ones are tinged by the fact that the experience has fled. A memory is a funeral for experience. Roleplaying games are designed to create those funerals. It's the way they work. You can't have what you want. You must confront something external and there is a point beyond which your personal agency is useless. The world is merciless, and it doesn't matter who you are. Even joy is not the joy you designed.

That's the difference between an experience and a story. Fuck stories. This is the way roleplaying games work. It's the way they unfold as nothing else does, and it depends on a marriage of trust and cruelty. When we share a table, I trust that your cruelty and the world's will be worthwhile, even when it says "no." Even when I'm wrong, and when you hurt me, and I can't see the purpose or process. That's where memories come from. That's what makes them authentic. It lights the pyre.

Let me tell you something. That other player, that GM, that writer, that line editor . . . they're not there to help you fulfill a wish, even if it's a voluntary quasi-tragedy. When you control it, it's just another dumb story. They are not there to share with you. They are there to set up boundaries, barriers and traps. These traps are for you, not your character. They can be sweet or horrific. They're standing against your desires. This can be disorienting. It's almost like other games, but those are usually fair. This isn't. You need something to get a grip on. You seek refuge in motifs, cliches and the stuff everybody outside the scene thinks is schlock. Normal doesn't always cut it; to survive the experience, you need to be a wizard, or a guy with a sword. You need a default shtick to keep your feet on the ground.

If the group is smart, they'll eventually attack that, too.

In another mood, I'd be happy to say "To each their own." Now? Fuck that. So what system/game would you use to recreate the "Revelatory Backstory" effect? I don't know, because it's absurd.

Do you really think:

Adrian Veidt: 'Do it?' Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

. . . is supported by Veidt's player and Dan's player deciding it would be really cool, and then having Dan's player explain how he's totally shocked. He's not shocked. It means nothing.

No:

Doctor Manhattan: We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

You struggle against the strings. You remember. That's the beauty of the form.
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Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]hot_pants
2008-07-18 03:44 am (UTC)

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it might be because i'm kinda drunk, but this is blazing, inspirational, burning writing. you make me want to kidnap people to roleplay with.
[User Picture]From: [info]elissa_carey
2008-07-18 04:05 am (UTC)

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Not sure what my excuse is, then. I haven't had a drop.
[User Picture]From: [info]madmanofprague
2008-07-18 04:28 am (UTC)

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RAGE AGAINST THE STORY MECHANICS
[User Picture]From: [info]heron61
2008-07-18 04:06 am (UTC)

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That is indeed why I game, and also something that strongly inspires my RPG writing.
[User Picture]From: [info]brand_of_amber
2008-07-18 04:49 am (UTC)

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Next time we get together, remind me of this. I have somethings to say about it, but the net won't carry them.

I'll buy you beer too.
[User Picture]From: [info]bcwalker
2008-07-18 04:57 am (UTC)

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You get it. Good God, man you get it.
[User Picture]From: [info]mearls
2008-07-18 05:17 am (UTC)

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Brilliant, just brilliant. It's like someone finally explained why I play RPGs.
[User Picture]From: [info]mytholder
2008-07-18 01:24 pm (UTC)

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Yes.
[User Picture]From: [info]charlequin
2008-07-18 04:57 pm (UTC)

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This is something I've tried to explain in the past and not really had the words to do so. Awesome.

[User Picture]From: [info]tigerbunny_db
2008-07-19 02:00 am (UTC)

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Not wrong. Caustic, overstated, but definitely not wrong.

However, there's a completely different motivation for "playing story" that this doesn't see at all and is in violent denial of. Not to *experience* anything. To *say* something. "This is how it should have been." TO take a fiction (or a reality) and *refuse* it, remake it, bend it to your own will. That's why I play, most often. I get the whole "vicarious experience" thing - truly. I'd rather get that in another medium. I come to RPGs to *create*.
From: [info]mythusmage
2008-07-19 03:01 am (UTC)

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You come to RPGs to shape the world. You come to have an impact, to make a difference. That is what you come to RPGs for, to mean something. In a world and a society where you are degraded and belittled by the powers that be, in an RPG you can be somebody. In a story you watch as another does heroic things, in an RPG you can be the hero.
[User Picture]From: [info]tigerbunny_db
2008-07-19 03:47 am (UTC)

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No, no. I want to tell that story. It's not about *being* that character. It's about *creating* and *portraying* that character.
[User Picture]From: [info]pretentiousfool
2008-07-19 08:44 am (UTC)

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This is exactly what I feel.

It is also reason why I no longer go to The Forge or Story Games. I appreciate what the posters on those sites are trying to do. It just isn't what gaming is to me.
[User Picture]From: [info]the_tall_man
2008-07-19 05:29 pm (UTC)

RE: "You're doing it wrong!"

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Meh. It's not true when those guys say it, either. Or the guys over there, or over there, or when I do it.
[User Picture]From: [info]binro33
2008-07-20 03:30 pm (UTC)

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I disagree that storytelling isn't part of it. To me TRGP is about the group (the entire group) building on each other's creativity. I've always enjoyed the storytelling aspect, it's just that my players and I (or my GM and us players) both worked at writing the story. My players and I were not afraid to re-work our ideas as they unfolded if they were not jiving with each other. I'd have an idea of where I expected things to end up, but they didn't always get where I expected them to. If the players took things in an unexpected direction, I'd go with the flow. The GM is still the lynchpin of the process, the central point through which the ideas all flowed, but it's the whole group that works at it.

From: [info]mythusmage
2008-07-21 07:33 am (UTC)

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A roleplaying game isn't about your story, a roleplaying game is about you. You with a few differences, but you. The group you play with is not working together to create something, the group you play with is working together to solve a problem. It could be something grand and glorious like stopping the destruction of reality as we know it. It could be finding something to do on a Thursday night in the Wight Town neighborhood when you're broke and your god is miffed at you for being a wise ass. You want to treat cats as clarinets, and that is a goal doomed to failure.
[User Picture]From: [info]binro33
2008-07-22 01:38 am (UTC)

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the group you play with is working together to solve a problem.

And the story unfolds as they solve it.

You want to treat cats as clarinets, and that is a goal doomed to failure.

Sounds like you need a better gaming group.
[User Picture]From: [info]mechanteanemone
2008-07-20 07:23 pm (UTC)

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Huh. A role-playing game that never becomes a story bores me. I have to have a story. But then, I don't understand why the RIFTS game wasn't about story? It sounds like there was a story, anyway.
[User Picture]From: [info]tundra_no_caps
2008-07-20 07:48 pm (UTC)

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I think his problem is with "Story Now!", when your goal is a story, and you do things to create a story (possibly only if it's the main goal or comes at the expense of "role-playing"?).

Everything can become "Story later", fuck, a Chess game can be made into a 'story'.

Edited at 2008-07-20 07:49 pm (UTC)
[User Picture]From: [info]mechanteanemone
2008-07-20 07:52 pm (UTC)

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Heh. I'm very much in the "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" gamer faction. Sometimes I want one style of game, and sometimes another. I suspect that for longer-term play, my preferences are close to Malcolm's, but I like "Story Now" games too.
From: [info]mythusmage
2008-07-21 07:36 am (UTC)

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"A role-playing game that never becomes a story bores me."

Sounds to me like somebody has become a glutton for tedium.
[User Picture]From: [info]johnaegard
2008-07-22 04:58 am (UTC)

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I once played a story game that was like a super awesome jazz improv.

It was a con game. There were seven of us. I knew two of the others pretty well, two passingly well, and the other two were pretty much strangers to me.

Somehow, after an hour of character creation, premise generation, and boundaries-setting, we all slipped into a weird merged mindspace. We knew when to solo. We knew when we should be audience and when we should be supporting cast. We knew when to wisecrack, when to give heat, when to take heat. We were cohesive even when our guns were in each others' faces and a single pip on a die prevented two guys from becoming deck pizza topping.

It was completely instinctive. I don't know where much of what I did or said came from, it was just there, in some zen space.

I'd lived in the moment that way exactly once before. It was back when I was a linebacker, and I had a three-interception game.

And when our timeslot was running down and the end came, we were all utterly surprised by the outcome of this thing that all of us created, that none of us alone could have created. I won't ever forget that game, or the people involved, or how, when the ending revealed itself, everyone surrendered to it because it was so ideal.

It sounds like you'll never have that experience.
[User Picture]From: [info]eyebeams
2008-07-22 07:54 am (UTC)

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You're describing the psychological state called "flow," which I've done previous writing about. Flow is done. Everybody's experienced it and it doesn't correlate to any particular activity, as you yourself admit when you compare it to a sports flow-state.

Flow is interesting, because group flow is essentially the psychology of fascism or cult activity. Subordination to arbitrary directives, loss of individuality -- it's identical to the psychological state desired by authoritarian institutions.

I've felt it. Why the fuck should I desire it? It's just a stupid trick.

I'm not interested in "flow." I'm interested in roleplaying, and the things only it does.
From: (Anonymous)
2008-07-23 08:46 pm (UTC)

Interesting

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Malcolm is always wrong, he is wrong about everything he has ever written, and possibly wrong about everything he has ever thought (if only we could but know for certain!), but this is a very interestingly wrong critique with much valuable about it, so it would be untoward for me to argue. Kudos.

JDCorley
[User Picture]From: [info]eyebeams
2008-07-23 09:33 pm (UTC)

Re: Interesting

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Your statement is not nearly as useful a cover for your intellectual cowardice as you think.

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